Resisting Science?
by BradfordAn article in USA Today entitled 'Resistance to science' has early roots begins with a pair of psychologists considering this question:
Stem cells, global warming, evolution, vaccination –Â why do some scientific ideas push political and societal hot buttons?
As one of the researchers correctly observes: "To be scientifically educated means you have to pick up a lot of counter-intuitive beliefs," He then goes on to make this attention getter:
One intuition that causes trouble for science is "promiscuous teleology," a natural tendency in children to see a purpose and design in everything, part of normal development in making sense of the world. For this reason, children in studies prefer creationist explanations for animals and people, studies show too.
So, seeing purpose and design is a normal tendency which must be changed. Ever mindful of Francis Crick's admonition that "biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved," TT once engaged in a counter de-programming effort which yielded some results.
The article goes on to state the unsurprising observation that: "An added childhood source of resistance is how we learn to defer to authority," but then it departs from the usual course of development to note that:
Many people who accept that natural selection and evolution are reasonable explanations for where species come from, can't explain the concepts, polls show. This "scientifically credulous subpopulation accepts this information because they trust the people who say it is true," says the review.
This is refreshing in that it is both true and counter to the usual meme that attributes the sheep mentality to other than mainstream believers. It rightly notes that belief, in the absence of an understanding of an underlying scientific explanation, is authority based. Then there is this:
Bloom adds. "We have to understand the idea that supernatural or religious ideas are not the product of stupidity or malice, but are in fact, normal human nature."
Now how did the stupidity or malice supposition get there in the first place?
May 23rd, 2007 at 12:36 pm
Bloom and Weisberg have a review article in this week's issue of Science (subscription required).
A couple of choice excerpts:
"Promiscuous teleology" — now that's a phrase that belongs in every ID critic's vocabulary.
Comment by keiths — May 23, 2007 @ 12:36 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Bradford:
Um… it got there through repetitive force asserted by scientistic know-it-alls who get their itty feewings hurt if others don't bow down to their claimed 'authority'?
Comment by Joy — May 23, 2007 @ 12:40 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 12:51 pm
One additional comment on the belief that the natural tendency "to see a purpose and design in everything" causes trouble for science. The negation of seeing purpose and design is not an empirically grounded axiom. It is philosphical.
Comment by Bradford — May 23, 2007 @ 12:51 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 1:47 pm
Oh, so now at least I know what's wrong with me. I've got a psychological problem. And I've got it pretty bad because I've got suspicions and disagreements on all those things he mentions – the safety and efficacy of vaccination, global warming, neoDarwinian evolution, Big Bang cosmology.
The thing about people with psychological problems, if they are severe enough, is that they can be treated and controlled against their will.
Comment by onething — May 23, 2007 @ 1:47 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 2:00 pm
There are some basic quirks of the human brain. One such is an overactive tendency to impute agency. Another basic quirk of the brain is an overactive tendency to impute materiality. For instance, when dreaming, hallucinating on alcohol or drugs, suffering from mental illness, seeing a mirage in a desert, or experiencing some other optical illusion, people sometimes imagine there's a physical reality to what they're 'seeing', when in fact there isn't.
I personally would not conclude from these facts that either agency or the physical world is an illusion. But perhaps some folks would. Of course, the truth is that the physical world and agency are both real. Only madmen and the proponents of atrocious arguments imagine otherwise.
To be sure, agency is not an empirical notion even to begin with, so it makes no sense to talk about double-checking for it. No empirical finding ever entails the existence of an agent. But no empirical finding ever entails the existence of matter either. Every experimental test is consistent with, for example, Berkeleyan idealism.
Both 'agency' and 'matter' are thus not empirical hypotheses. But think about that again for one second. What is an empirical observation if not something carried out by a rational agent? What is an act of double-checking if it's not something carried out by a rational agent? What is scientific rationality if it's not a property possessed by, and a normative ideal pursued by, rational agents?
We used to think rational agents called 'scientists' did science, but perhaps to some that's an increasingly quaint notion these days, given the advances in neuroscience. Modern brain imaging technologies are capable of revealing the mechanical correlates in the brain of apparently subjective mental acts. But what examines and interprets these brain images if not rational agents? Why should one, rationally speaking, rely on such technologies if they weren't purposely designed by rational agents?
The incoherence of doing neuroscience or any kind of science while denying the reality of rational agency is profound, since science presupposes such agency engaging in a process of justifying beliefs, not merely having beliefs. And justification is a concept of an irreducibly intentional act aimed at understanding the logical, not physical, relations that obtain between the content of the mental states of rational agents on the one hand, and various mathematical or other scientific propositions on the other. Neither such propositions, nor abstract relations obtaining among them such as logical validity, logical consistency, logical entailment, and other logical modalities, nor mental content itself, reduce to material processes.
For example, the propositions of Bayesian probability theory are often interpreted as prescribing logical rules for belief revision in the light of new evidence. But both the concept of a logical rule and the concept of evidence presuppose that rational understanding is a possible act, and hence presuppose rational agency. They do not presuppose, nor do they reduce to, material processes. And, of course, Godel's celebrated theorems prove that there are mathematical truths that rational agents can construct but which are unprovable by any possible finite mechanical process of computation, which strongly suggests, as Penrose and others have argued, that rational agency cannot be simulated or replaced completely by any purely mechanical procedure.
Comment by stunney — May 23, 2007 @ 2:00 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 2:21 pm
Well at least I can claim self-consistency"”a prerequisite to being correct. For due to their lack of testability, repeatability, and falsifiability, I would claim that neither ID nor this just-so psycho-babble qualifies as science. Anyone who accepts one of the two as science is, in my opinion, self inconsistent.
More and more I think Rutherford's "it's all physics or stamp collecting" comment was spot on!
Comment by David Heddle — May 23, 2007 @ 2:21 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 2:37 pm
Nobody denies that rational agency exists (well, maybe some philosophers do, but no normal person), the only disagreement is about whether it is somehow foundational to the universe (as you (stunney) seem to think) or is an emergent phenomenon that arises out of mindless processes. Does mind precede matter, or matter precede mind? While I am closer to the latter position I feel that neither is quite right, which is why I spend some of my precious time hanging out here.
Another reason: I've had some experiences in my life where the universe seemed to be suffused with purpose, or "promiscuous teleology" which is as good a phrase as any to describe it. These didn't convert me to any religion or philosophy, and they might be easily attributable to some neurological hiccup. Nonetheless, I try to make sense of those experiences, and would even like to recreate them if possible.
Comment by mtraven — May 23, 2007 @ 2:37 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 2:37 pm
Am I right to presume you are a physicist.
Comment by Salvador T. Cordova — May 23, 2007 @ 2:37 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 3:31 pm
Rutherford was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry, not for physics. Apparently, he was a mere stamp-collector himself.
Comment by Raevmo — May 23, 2007 @ 3:31 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 3:40 pm
Sal,
You betcha.
Raevmo,
No, chemistry being a subfield of physics is consistent with his statement!
But I dead hear, not sure if it was apocryphal, that he made some snide comment about that at the NP ceremony.
Comment by David Heddle — May 23, 2007 @ 3:40 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 4:26 pm
David Heddle wrote:
The story I heard was that Rutherford commented that while he had studied the rapid transformation of one element into another via radioactive decay, he had never witnessed a change so rapid as his transmutation from physicist to chemist.
Comment by keiths — May 23, 2007 @ 4:26 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 4:32 pm
David:
I guess biology is a subfield of chemistry then, and hence a subsubfield of physics. If that is the case, who are the stamp-collectors?
Comment by Raevmo — May 23, 2007 @ 4:32 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 4:32 pm
I'd put the entire biology department at most universities into that credulous subpopulation.
Comment by mcromer — May 23, 2007 @ 4:32 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 4:37 pm
This is an admirable statement of the reductionist faith.
However it must be kept in mind that no major category of holons has ever been reduced to its component holons.
This goes for reduction of chemistry to physics, reduction of protein folding morphology to chemistry, reduction of cytology to biochemistry, reduction of organ function to cell biology, reduction of organism to organ function, or reduction of society to individual human interaction.
Never once has it been demonstrated that any of these larger wholes can be fully explained by their components.
And so the entire enterprise of reductionistic materialism is a faith-based initiative.
Comment by mcromer — May 23, 2007 @ 4:37 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 4:50 pm
From the article:
Yet let's not make the mistake of thinking that ID critics have somehow shed their childhood "promiscuous teleology." Because they remain closed-minded about teleology in nature, I have a hypothesis – the human tendency for "promiscuous teleology" may be repressed in such people and thus seeks an outlet in other areas. Years of experience have provided plenty of anecdotal evidence to support this hypothesis. Most critics, for example, cannot take ID proponents at "face value" but instead hyper-focus on "motivations." And if you think about it, this obsession with motivations is an attempt to "see a purpose and design in everything." Or consider how many ID critics seriously embrace conspiracy theories, often viewing the DI as some giant puppet-master that orchestrates anything and everything related to ID.
Comment by MikeGene — May 23, 2007 @ 4:50 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 4:52 pm
Then you must have read Robert Laughlin's "A Different Universe". The author is an advocate of "strong emergence" like you appear to be. One of the examples he gives in his book is the viscosity of water, which has never been deduced from the properties of water molecules. Or has it? There was a very recent paper claiming they actually had done just that. Don't remember the reference though.
Comment by Raevmo — May 23, 2007 @ 4:52 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 4:58 pm
mcromer
True enough.
Those are distinguished, in part, using that old adage that "any discipline with the word science in its name, isn't."
Comment by David Heddle — May 23, 2007 @ 4:58 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 5:12 pm
That's because children haven't been brainwashed by the ateleologists.
When I read garbage like this, I become more and more convinced that we need to abandon the existing institutions of science which appear to be the domain of asperger's spectrum individuals (whether through birth or training) who are simply incapable of perceiving the more holistic and telic threads running through nature.
They mistake the simple thoughts which constitute a scientific model for the depth and richness of the reality in which all thoughts are embedded and the illuminating light of awareness that even allows a thought to be perceived. And then they wonder why the public is so out of touch with "scientific truth".
It is the pathologically conceptualized approach to life that mistakes thinking the word "eagle" for the experience of watching that magnificent being soar across the sky. And then pats itself on the back for knowing the word "eagle" and laughs at everyone else who talks about ineffable nature of the moment.
Blind, deaf and dumb to reality. . .
Comment by mcromer — May 23, 2007 @ 5:12 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 5:20 pm
Not yet, although I have it on my "to read" list somewhere. . . My first introduction to anti-reductionism was Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance which I read about in the late 80s. Sheldrake's theory even proposes that these emergent properties "emerge" evolutionarily.
In any event, there has been no reduction of chemistry to the Schrodinger equation, no reduction of protein folding to the chemical attractive forces, no reduction of cell behavior to biochemistry, and no reduction of organism behavior to cellular biology.
Instead, causation appears to flow both directions from the smaller to the larger systems and vice versa.
Comment by mcromer — May 23, 2007 @ 5:20 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 5:24 pm
mcromer wrote:
Matthew,
That paragraph says a lot more about your prejudices than it does about scientists.
Comment by keiths — May 23, 2007 @ 5:24 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 5:29 pm
But your paradise already exists: in Saudi Arabia they have the same attitude as you. No annoying science institutes full of autistic people who simply can't see what's so obvious to regular folks. No science education because it might destroy the children's natural believe that allahdunnit. What are you waiting for?
Comment by Raevmo — May 23, 2007 @ 5:29 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 5:35 pm
Raevmo, where do you get your conceptions of the world? Maybe this is contingent on your definition of science institutes but they do teach science in Saudi Arabia. Lord Rutherford might even say that they teach real science.
Comment by Bradford — May 23, 2007 @ 5:35 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 6:22 pm
i find these comments interesting, especially in contrast to harris' statements of rationality in the nonbelievers in america. as ive said elsewhere, i would say something like MAJORITY of americans are hopelessly irrational, believing whatever they believe merely on the authority of science or the authority of religion. when i "cross the lines" from out of my church community, i find athiests and evolutionists equally as irrational, and equally unable to explain why they believe what they believe.
Comment by dantedanti — May 23, 2007 @ 6:22 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 6:25 pm
mtraven wrote:
I agree that the issue is whether mind or matter is ontologically foundational.
I think there's a lot of evidence that the correct answer is mind, and I explain in summary form how abductive reasoning justifies the theistic hypothesis here.
In addition to the normative character of rational agency and the complex of logical modalities that go with it which I alluded to in the post you're replying to, there's the enduring and profound nature of the physical universe's rational intelligibility. How are we to explain this?
Let's assume everyone agrees there can be no informationless stuff, and agrees that information is not completely reducible to any of its material mediums. The theist can still use these facts about information to argue for theism. Briefly stated: it is very plausible that an essential property of all information is that it is intrinsically understandable by a rational mind. So theism has non-arbitrary reasons for not taking matter as the ultimate; but for taking, instead, something intrinsically and necessarily endowed with rational understanding (and, of course, value), as the most plausible candidate for being the Ontologically and Explanatorily Ultimate Thing. Why? Because it's extremely unlikely, if not impossible due to incoherence, that information-bearing matter has the property of 'understandability by rational minds' as one of its intrinsic and essential properties, merely 'by accident' as it were. This idea was notably suggested by Wigner's well known essay, and is basically a variant or component of the generic fine-tuning argument. The universe is not only tuned for life, but also for rational minds actually understanding how the universe works! Both facts are in my view quite compelling to behold, and I find it extraordinarily difficult to believe even that it's a realistic possibility that they are merely the unintended or accidental consequences of meaningless material processes.
We can go on to wonder about the nature of the 'accident'; was it of the 'amazingly lucky coincidence' or 'fluke' kind; or was it an accident of this kind: "Well, it just happens to be the case that the basic nature of the universe/multiverse necessitates the emergent mental properties of matter and hence a fit between matter and matter's emergent mental properties-"”–such as being able to solve Fermat's Last Theorem or to discover quarks"”-is to be, um, er, ummm, expected; but, um, the universe/multiverse necessitates this fact in a wholly non-conscious, non-purposeful, unintentional, and essentially meaningless way""¦"¦.
Yeah, that kind of, ahem, 'necessary accident'"¦
There are other things that don't look right with the magicmatterdidit hypothesis. For instance, and of rather central interest to this blog, how could unintentional physical states, states of the world devoid of all mental content, originate symbolic conventions?
Then there's the hard problem of consciousness.
Over at dangerous idea this appeared today, and it tackles materialism head on with respect to that question:
If consciousness is a problem for materialism because it seems incapable of being a component of a complete, objective, but purely physical description of the universe, then it's got an even bigger problem accounting for the apparently objective nature moral value, in my view.
Somebody called Alex made this comment over on a different thread at dangerous idea on the relation between theism/atheism and ethics:
My comment there was this:
I also posted a longer comment on the same topic, which explains why I don't think materialism is coherent with our moral experience.
Comment by stunney — May 23, 2007 @ 6:25 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 6:32 pm
Sorry, I can't give you sources off the top of my head, but less than 0.1% of GDP is spent on research in SA. Don't forget, this is the country where they prefer to let girls burn to death rather than leave a burning school dressed inappropriately.
Comment by Raevmo — May 23, 2007 @ 6:32 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 6:46 pm
dantedanti wrote:
Has Harris stated that nonbelievers are automatically rational? If he has, I'd be interested (and surprised), because I would certainly disagree with such a statement. Do you have a quote?
Comment by keiths — May 23, 2007 @ 6:46 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 6:54 pm
Why is that very plausible? And what do you mean by "understandable" Whatever happened to the creator's mysterious ways?
Comment by Raevmo — May 23, 2007 @ 6:54 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 6:55 pm
keiths, part of what I think dantedanti is getting at is that religion doesn't seem to be the catalyst for irrationality. People are irrational regardless of whether or not they are religious, and so religion becomes nothing more than a convenient excuse.
Comment by thechristiancynic — May 23, 2007 @ 6:55 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 7:37 pm
Hi CC,
But religion is a catalyst for irrationality in many cases.
For example, I've known engineers who were perfectly rational when discussing technical topics, but would turn around and argue vociferously that Muhammad flew to heaven on the back of a winged horse named Burak.
I could give you similar examples from many faiths.
It's religion that is causing the irrationality in these cases.
Comment by keiths — May 23, 2007 @ 7:37 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 7:49 pm
How do you know that religion is the cause? Shoot me a process by which one could accurately determine source of irrationality.
Consequently, this reminds me of my days in the physics classroom where the teacher made some kids' heads spin by showing the mathematical proof that 0.999…=1. Several flat out refused to believe it. I personally blame it on repeating decimals.
Comment by thechristiancynic — May 23, 2007 @ 7:49 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 8:39 pm
Briefly stated: it is very plausible that an essential property of all information is that it is intrinsically understandable by a rational mind.
That's not too difficult Raevmo. Information is represented by symbolic notation and the correlation between symbolic notation and that which is represented by it is made by an intellect. Logical associations. They are used on IQ tests.
Comment by Bradford — May 23, 2007 @ 8:39 pm
May 23rd, 2007 at 8:57 pm
Hmmm. Then why won't they (and you for that matter) read material that challenges reductionist materialism? I offered several times to send you a chapter from an expensive academic textbook that I own, free of charge, so you could evaluate the evidence for yourself. You never responded to any of those offers (unless there was some problem with my email delivery). The only conclusion I could come to was that you are irrationally avoiding evidence that your belief system is wrong, and that you are not serious about discovering the truth, because you are quite sure you already own it.
What is it that causes the irrationality of many scientists and materialists who dismiss mountains of evidence against the materialist hypothesis without even reading it? What causes the irrationality of scientists who rail against belief in psi phenomena as "superstition" when they will not read the documented evidence for it? What causes the irrationality of postulating belief in a "real" material world when the experimental results of quantum mechanics keep telling us that the quantum world cannot be locally real? Why are materialists not willing to consider idealism as an alternative that does not suffer the infinite quagmire of the hard problem of consciousness?
It's far more fun to pick on the silliness of literalist religious belief than face your own lacunae, isn't it.
Comment by mcromer — May 23, 2007 @ 8:57 pm
May 24th, 2007 at 1:22 am
It is difficult if not impossible to do science without the supposition that there is a real world. Quantum phenomenon are no less real than any other, since they can be confirmed by experiment.
I'm not sure why you think that materialists are in a quagmire, since materialist science has been advancing nicely while psi, superstition, ID, and philosophical idealism have not advanced at all — unsuprising, since they have no method for doing so. Well, actually, you may have a point — consciousness is a quagmire for materialism, and most scientists are careful to stay out of the tarpit. The few that enter tend to get bogged down.
It is an open question whether this is because of an inherent limitation in science, or because consciousness is a concept like epicycles, phlogiston, or ether — that is, an attempt at explanation which just doesn't work very well and will eventually be replaced by something better.
Comment by mtraven — May 24, 2007 @ 1:22 am
May 24th, 2007 at 1:27 am
cc kind of got what i was getting at…..
however, what i may mean to say is that harris, as noted, suggests that religion is a catalyst for irrationalism, that it encourages irrationalism. indirectly i read that he is also saying that science is a catalyst for rationality (and i may be able to provide you a direct quote if you press me, though im lazy, so please dont)…
problem i have with this, is that i know many athiests, and i have yet to meet one that believes in evolution or athiesm rationally, but merely through appeals to Science, and a science they dont understand in the slightlest. the same is true of many believers, irrational about their religion, as well as many other things in their lives.
point is, from my empirical experiences, i find the religious people i know (for the most part) to indulge in "wishfull thinking" the majority of the time, as well as i find those athiests i know who are hard bent on science.
do i give a shit about science? not in the least, i dont understand it, and i dont try to. it is not much interest to me how it works, other than methodologically, philosophically, and practically (like i get an ipod). i simply find that americans indulge most of their time in irrationality and "wishful thinking, add dogma in there too, no matter which side of the fence they are from (or fence sitting for that matter): athiests, christians, evolutionists, creationists, etc, etc, etc, no matter which issue, belief, goal, situation it is they are talking about. i find that science has not taught americans of any background to be any more rational. harris disagrees: its science that pushes reason and religion that pushes irrationality. people exposed to science are no more rational than anyone else, they are equally irrational from all my experience in the usa: "they taught me evolution in school, and i get an ipod. thank my dick for science"
how do we know that its Religion that is the cause of irrationality? and how do we know that Science isnt doing anything more than wrapping itself in the flag of reason, in a way that every company in america wrapped itself in the american flag after 911 (which sold a ton of shit)?
science hasnt made anyone in america anymore rational in the past however many years…at least no american i have met.
on equal note: harris, wrapped in the flag of reason, as well as anyone else has yet to provide me their evidence and nondogmatic arguement that dogma can never be good, that i should care about civlization working, that civlization wouldnt keep working if we were all dogmatic as hell. a close athiest friend of mine who is working toward his phd in philosophy and science could only say when asked these questions, "hitler is the evidence".thanks. great point.
Comment by dantedanti — May 24, 2007 @ 1:27 am
May 24th, 2007 at 2:37 am
Reason can't be measured or otherwise quantitatively assessed. Its rules, principles, and norms are not physically detectable objects. The same may be said of Value.
Science in practice can often cause people to be dreadfully irrational, because an a priori commitment to methodological naturalism can make them a) unable to see the wood for the trees, that is, unable to see the limitations that necessarily attach to observability if held as the defining criterion of rational belief; and b) unable to understand value as such.
The 20th century was the most scientific of all to date. It was also the bloodiest, and most polluted.
Some folks revel in the slogan, 'Science is as science does'. Well, what science does includes figuring out how to make better cluster bombs, gas chambers, and generally sucking insatiably at the tit of the military-industrial complex, producing orgies of irrationality in Vietnam, Iraq, etc, and in the mindless consumer culture that ignores the environmental damage, exploitation, and colossal waste that goes with it.
How do you like them apples?
Oh, you don't approve of all that? Why?
Did science tell you why? Or was it something else, such as moral conscience, about whose existence and meaning science conveniently claims to be either agnostic or skeptical, or, in its boldest incarnations, suggests is illusory or non-existent?
Comment by stunney — May 24, 2007 @ 2:37 am
May 24th, 2007 at 2:53 am
stunney wrote:
stunney,
You've let yourself get out of touch with contemporary science. Far from ignoring morality, science is hotly engaged in explaining its origins, with a great deal of success so far.
Comment by keiths — May 24, 2007 @ 2:53 am
May 24th, 2007 at 6:15 am
Raevmo wrote:
Long ago Plato saw that mathematical information is fundamental to reality and essentially correlative to mind.
More generally, information must be communicable in principle to something having mental states. If it isn't communicable even in principle, it just isn't information. And what renders it communicable in practice is the intrinsically mental phenomenon of language in its broadest sense, the sense that includes mathematical, programming, code, and ordinary human languages, and perhaps the Language of Thought, and perhaps quasi-languages among certain animal species.
What do you mean by 'mean'?
By 'understandable' I mean communicable via language (in the broad sense) to a subject capable of having the relevant mental states.
They're called quantum mechanics.
Let me repeat: long ago Plato saw that mathematical information is fundamental to reality and essentially correlative to mind.
Comment by stunney — May 24, 2007 @ 6:15 am
May 24th, 2007 at 7:48 am
Science is descriptive, morality is prescriptive.
Goodness cannot be reduced to or defined in terms of Something Else. As G. E. Moore famously put it, "Goodness is a simple, undefinable, non-natural property." It's not something amenable to testing in laboratory experiments or logically derivable from even a complete physical description of the world.
I agree with Moore on that point.
And always beware too of that Achilles Heel of 'brightism'—its penchant for committing the genetic fallacy.
Comment by stunney — May 24, 2007 @ 7:48 am
May 24th, 2007 at 9:21 am
It seems like there is more than a genetic fallacy here. Even after acknowledging the hard problem of consciousness, the materialists go on to ignore it in their "explanations". Isn't the problem of moral values a subset of the problem of qualia? How then can it be explained by science?
We need to invent a new fallacy here. Maybe we could call it the fallacy of not minding the [explanatory] gap.
Comment by Brian Killian — May 24, 2007 @ 9:21 am
May 24th, 2007 at 9:45 am
stunney invokes the idea of the "genetic fallacy" without explaining how it applies to materialism. I think it's he who is committing that error, by refusing to believe that mind can arise from the non-mental material world. That is, a materialist doesn't think that mental phenomena are any less wonderful because they arise from material brains. It's stunney who thinks that mind has to have some independent origin, who believes that a material genetic story for mind is somehow inadequate. Science, strictly speaking, doesn't make any value judgements at all, but underlying the anti-science view is the idea that mind is so wonderful that it can't have arisen from matter. That is an example of the genetic fallacy applied backwards, to go from a value judgment to a conclusion about origins. But it's just as false as the forward version.
Comment by mtraven — May 24, 2007 @ 9:45 am
May 24th, 2007 at 9:55 am
dante, I have to say that I like your candor, even though you're tad bit rougher with your language than I would be.
Comment by thechristiancynic — May 24, 2007 @ 9:55 am
May 24th, 2007 at 10:33 am
Brian Killian wrote:
I think the problem of moral values in the first instance is really a subset of the problem of intentionality rather than of the qualia problem. That is, it starts with certain beliefs and thoughts and desires—propositional attitudes—-regarding one's own inter-human conduct. I think you have to start with beliefs about right and wrong to be a moral agent. If you have no moral beliefs, I don't see how one can be deemed a moral agent at all, even though one might still have lots of feelings relation to inter-human conduct.
Qualia may certainly include moral sentiments, but lacking any moral beliefs would, in my view, prevent sentiments from attaining the status of being moral sentiments.
But since materialism can't handle intentionality either in my opinion, I don't even need to invoke qualia. How can piece of matter be about another piece; how can a piece of matter be about the proposition that torture is evil; how can a piece of matter be true or justifed or irrational or incorrect or logically inconsistent, etc?
I like it.:smile:
Comment by stunney — May 24, 2007 @ 10:33 am
May 24th, 2007 at 10:59 am
I'm still bowled over by stunney's claim that "it is very plausible that an essential property of all information is that it is intrinsically understandable by a rational mind," given that this isn't a definition of information I've ever heard in any sort of rigorous context. What do you mean by "intrinsically understandable" I'd wager you a few bucks that if I uuencode and rot13 a JPEG and send it to you without explaining what it is, you won't be able to understand it, no matter how long you squint. But I suppose you mean given any accessory information necessary to decode it, or something like that, so I'll leave out pathological cases like the above; I think we'd agree that a book contains information even if it's in a language that you can't read. (By your definition, does it still contain information if no one can read it? Does the Voynich manuscript contain information?)
Here, a thought experiment, nicked from a CS lecture of some years past. Consider a b-bit message A; it can be a poem, an encoded image, or whatever–something you understand. Now generate b random bits; call it B. (According to Shannon theory, this constitutes b bits of information, but we're not going by that.) According to you, these random bits, because they contain no message, contain no information. Now, compute the exclusive-or (XOR) of the two strings, and call it C. This has a few properties: namely, B and C are indistinguishable from each other, and each is indistinguishable from random garbage. Given one, you can't extract a single bit of A.
Here's the thing, though; computing B XOR C gives you back A in its entirety. Neither B nor C, individually, contains information, according to you. But if you combine them, they do. So your theory states that we can get information from nothing. That's kind of weird, isn't it? It's not a very rigorous theory of information you have; it seems more like hand-waving and "I know it when I see it".
Comment by grendelkhan — May 24, 2007 @ 10:59 am
May 24th, 2007 at 11:37 am
I said "real material world", not "real world".
Clearly there is a real world that we can observe. Quantum mechanics makes it quite clear that the observable world is not like anything we could term "material".
Of course reductionist science has succeeded in certain areas, but in other areas reductionism has failed completely to make any progress.
100+ years of failure to suggest an explanation for personal memory, despite billions of dollars spent and tens of thousands of animals sacrificed. We can break the brain system for accessing new memories, but that's it. No trace of the where these memories are supposed to be "stored" in the brain.
60+ years of failure to accomplish computational AI, despite billions of dollars spent and every five years a new promise of "AI, ten years out". Reminds me of the Millenial Christians who keep promising a date for Jesus to fly down on clouds, and then push it back when the return doesn't happen.
100+ years of failure to accomplish any theory whatsoever of subjectivity, which is literally everything and the only thing we can ever know for certain. We only gain access to the hypothesized model of an objective world through our subjective thoughts, sense perceptions, and emotions. The idealists state that this is because the objective world is itself built out of mind-stuff — a proposition drawing enormous support from the findings of quantum mechanics.
No plausible mechanism for protein folding
No plausible mechanism for epigenesis
No plausible mechanism for wound healing
No plausible mechanism for psi phenomena
The list goes on and on and on for the areas where reductionistic mechanism has failed to make any relevant process towards understanding holistic features of the universe.
Psi research has advanced enormously. Psi research has moved from boring activities like guessing Zener cards to more engaging experiments like the Ganzfeld. The most recent approach has been an emphasis on observing psi "in the field" through research such as testing telephone telepathy, rather than trying to find psi in artifical tasks unrelated to the natural history of psi. Your statement displays an absolute lack of familiarity with the research. There is now a good, testable theory for psi and holism — Rupert Sheldrake's hypothesis of morphogenetic fields. I am curious what advances in the philosophy of materialism you feel are lacking in the philosophy of idealism.
Consciousness is not a "concept". Consciousness is a word labelling the reality that you perceive concepts, sensations, and emotions. It is the central fact of existence — that for something to be, it must be perceived. A world without consciousness cannot be distinguished from a world that does not exist.
What is much more like "epicycles" is the mechanistic interpretation of consciousness and avoidance of obvious holistic properties like epigenesis, healing, regulation, the effect of intention on the physical body, placebo effect, sickness and death caused by beliefs. Somehow all these aspects of large-scale function are supposed to all be controlled by tiny little micromachines built out of atoms that create a convincing illusion of holism.
Comment by mcromer — May 24, 2007 @ 11:37 am
May 24th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
There's no plausible mechanism for wound healing?
mcromer, please explain the difference between the "real material world" and the "real world"; specifically, explain the evidence for phenomena which are nonmaterial.
Comment by grendelkhan — May 24, 2007 @ 12:04 pm
May 24th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
I read a descriptive process there, not a mechanism. Naming some of the chemicals released in the process is not the same as describing a detailed mechanism.
This is equivalent to those who believe the existence of chemical morphogens somehow explains morphogenesis, or how the existence of variant neurotransmitter receptor protein sequences in DNA somehow explains behavior.
Listing a few important reductionistic facts does not constitute a reductionistic account. Causation involves both reductionistic and holistic aspects.
Comment by mcromer — May 24, 2007 @ 12:36 pm
May 24th, 2007 at 1:07 pm
Let's grant that Sheldrake has found some evidence for telepathy. He did find some hard to explain statistically significant results that might be called telepathy (has anyone ever reproduced Sheldrake's results?) What is Sheldrake's mechanistic explanation for it, if any? And is it somehow "non-material" (whatever that means)? Just curious.
Comment by Raevmo — May 24, 2007 @ 1:07 pm
May 24th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
mcromer:
I don't understand. The article I linked to is hardly a list of chemicals found in a wound at various points in the process; there are sets of reactions, from clotting to angiogenesis and so forth, each triggered in an understood way by previous events. For instance, blood clotting starts when the platelets in the blood are exposed to collagen. What part of this isn't a mechanism?
Comment by grendelkhan — May 24, 2007 @ 1:47 pm
May 24th, 2007 at 3:42 pm
Grendelkhan,
Angiogenesis is not a chemical reaction. It is a morphogenetic process that involves coordinated cellular behavior and epigenetic processes. The presence of a signalling protein does not magically explain any of the rest of the process.
Comment by mcromer — May 24, 2007 @ 3:42 pm
May 24th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
mcromer: I don't get what you mean by "not a chemical reaction"; is there some part of the process which doesn't involve a chemical reaction? Where does it say that a signalling protein "magically explains" the rest of the process?
Comment by grendelkhan — May 24, 2007 @ 4:07 pm
May 24th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Sure. Dozens of researchers have reproduced his results, including studies of telephone telepathy, staring detection, and dogs who know when their owner is coming home. And additional replications are ongoing.
Sheldrake does not offer a "mechanistic" explanation but rather a holistic one. I'll let him speak for himself.
Comment by mcromer — May 24, 2007 @ 4:09 pm
May 24th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Where do you go from "a chemical reaction" to cells moving to the correct locations, dividing, differentiating into different tissue layers, creating three dimensional structures?
How does the presence of any particular chemical cause the epithelial cells to create new epigenetic structures in the wound area? Describe the reductionistic molecular machines that do this.
Of course there are chemical reactions going on. No one disputes that. But I am interested in how the presence of some chemical reactions, in and of themselves, results in the holistic process of angiogenesis?
When we see large-scale organization in nature, for example the rings of Saturn, solar flares, the circular shapes of orbits and spheres of planets, and the like, usually it is because fields are acting non-locally and holistically to influence the structures that emerge, not because the contact mechanics of little molecular machines. Particularly given the ability to regulate and heal, properties utterly beyond our reductionistic engineering, it seems increasingly likely that holistic properties are influencing biological systems in addition to the reductionistic aspects of biology.
Comment by mcromer — May 24, 2007 @ 4:13 pm
May 24th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
Thanks for the link. Interesting stuff. Did you try yourself one of those online telepathy tests, and if so how did it work out for you? I myself have never experienced telepathy as far as I can tell, but I sure would like to. Now, it seems to me that the telepathy detected so far is of a rather weak kind. Nobody seems to be able to actually use telepathy as a reliable means of communication. Why not? If there were a genetic predisposition to be better at telepathy, I would imagine that it would offer a substantial selective benefit, and by now we should be real good at it. So perhaps there is no genetic basis. Are there any ideas around on how to make more efficient use of morphogenetic fields, so that it might some day be useful in everyday life?
Comment by Raevmo — May 24, 2007 @ 4:29 pm
May 24th, 2007 at 4:30 pm
mcromer, are you saying that the article doesn't describe what you're asking for? Angiogenic growth factors activate receptors on endothelial cells, which release proteases that break down their surroundings and allow cells to escape and form sprouts and at this point I'm just quoting the article.
You keep using words like "reductionistic" and "holistic", but I don't think they mean what you think they mean. They're two different ways of looking at a system, but a system which displays emergent behavior doesn't require the sort of nonmaterialist woo that you seem to be so fond of; it just means it has to be looked at in a different way. You don't need anything nonmaterial to understand how air transmits sound, or how birds flock, but the behaviors are not apparent from looking at individual components (molecules, birds) of these systems.
You also equate materialistic and reductionistic science (mtraven said "materialist science" and you rephrased it as "reductionist science"), when the words mean something different. Flocking behavior, for instance, is well understood in entirely materialistic terms, and yet is, as pointed out above, does not lend itself to reductionism.
Comment by grendelkhan — May 24, 2007 @ 4:30 pm
May 24th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
me:
mcromer:
You can term it anything you like, but quantum mechanics is not supernatural, and both quantum phenomena and classical phenomenon are part of the natural world, which is the same as the material world, at least as I and most people use the term. I can't figure out what kind of distinction you are trying to make. Sheldrake's work is crap, as far as I can tell, but even he takes pains to note that his "morphic fields" are part of the natural world, rather than something supernatural.
me:
mcromer:
If you are doing science (or philosophy), then of course consciousness is a concept. Your subjective reality is real, but the terms you (or someone else) use to describe it are concepts that can capture it, generally imperfectly. My opinion is that "consciousness" is a very coarse and misleading term. Which is not to say it doesn't point to something real, but it doesn't point in a way that helps us understand what it is.
Comment by mtraven — May 24, 2007 @ 4:45 pm
May 24th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
mtraven wrote:
Please quote me at the bit where you think I commit the genetic fallacy.
Remember, I don't believe moral beliefs are unjustified or unreasonable or illusory or false because of morality's origins, any more than I think perceptual beliefs are because of perception's origins. Au contraire. I think both types of belief rest on our cognitive apparatus and that when functioning as it was designed by God to function, that apparatus will generally or normally yield justified beliefs.
By contrast, the attacks on the idea that morality is objective have all come from staunch atheists such as Mackie and Ayer, as well as sundry evolutionary sociobiologists.
Comment by stunney — May 24, 2007 @ 5:42 pm
May 24th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
grendelkhan wrote:
Please quote me in support of your ludicrous assertion.
According to me, er, where, exactly, smart boy? You're waving your hands as you flail around trying to construct a strawman that is so unrigorous that you don't even quote anything I've said. I can't decide if the sight is more pathetic than hilarious, or vice-versa.
My theory doesn't state any such thing. Are you drunk, or something?
If you're going to drink kool-aid and blow smoke at the same time, it might be a good idea to open the windows. You might end up intellectually asphyxiating yourself in a farrago of fabrications otherwise.
Comment by stunney — May 24, 2007 @ 5:57 pm
May 24th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
The shape of orbits requires holism to explain? That's a new one, considering there have been mechanistic explanations of that sort of thing for a few centuries. Or by "fields acting non-locally" do you mean gravity? Gravity may be nonlocal but it isn't magical, and there's nothing holistic about it. Gravity is just as mechanical as the little molecular machines.
Comment by mtraven — May 24, 2007 @ 6:02 pm
May 24th, 2007 at 6:08 pm
No direct quote, stunney, but your general argument seems to be that matter is dumb, we are smart (conscious), and that you don't believe smart stuff can arise from dumb stuff. That contains the kernel of the genetic fallacy, or its contrapositive. Your reasoning seems to be: if we arose from matter then we would be dumb, like matter, but we aren't, hence we didn't arise from matter but from the Big Immaterial Spirit. I, on the other hand, do not think our material origins impugns the quality of our minds.
Comment by mtraven — May 24, 2007 @ 6:08 pm
May 24th, 2007 at 7:06 pm
I never use the word "supernatural".
What exactly is "crap" about Sheldrake's work? I'm all ears.
Comment by mcromer — May 24, 2007 @ 7:06 pm
May 24th, 2007 at 9:01 pm
Yes, of course.
Of course it isn't "magical". I never claimed it was. I was using "magic" to refer to the supposition that biological epigenesis was the result of chemical reactions by themselves.
That is hardly the case. Gravity can be modelled a holistic field property or (alternately) modeled as a holistic distortion of spacetime. It appears as if every apparently separate part of the universe interacting with every other apparently separate part. What our measurements actually tell us is that gravity causes our macro-scale measurements to show the appearance of separate parts with properties that all influence each other according to Einstein's equations of special relativity, but at the microscale this notion of separate parts is absolutely and undeniably shown to be false.
The universe is an undivisible and inseparable oneness, but a oneness which takes on an appearance of separateness, space and time. But space and time are only perceptible in terms of relationships between apparently separate parts of the universe, and entanglement (and also the big bang theory) proves that the separateness is not fundamental. Since space and time are only measurable in terms of properties of the separate particles in relation to one another, and the apparently separate particles are absolutely demonstrated not to be separate in reality, there is no evidence for an independent existence for space and time either. So we are left with a measurable universe that is undeniably a unity, with space and time as derivable properties of that unity. That is a pretty amazing fact, and one completely at odds with standard notions of materialism.
This is not a fuzzy-headed speculation. This is the fundamental reality shown by the experimental findings of quantum mechanics. Anyone who argues against the fundamental unity of the observable universe is arguing against the findings of quantum mechanics. Anyone who argues for a universe that is not a fundamental indivisible whole is himself fuzzy-headed, because he is denying the experimental results of quantum mechanics.
I don't even know how to respond to begin to respond to this assertion. It is precisely backwards. Gravity and the other forces of physics are clearly and obviously holistic, given that they connect every (apparent) separate particle in the universe with influence on every other (apparent) separate particle.
Quantum mechanics and entanglement make it absolutely undeniable — there ARE no separate physical particles. It is impossible for separate physical particles to account for the experimental results of quantum mechanics. That notion is dead, gone, buried, absolutely kaput except in the imaginations of some materialists unwilling to face what quantum mechanics has proven with every experiment.
This is all amazing, but undeniably true.
Comment by mcromer — May 24, 2007 @ 9:01 pm
May 24th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
Sheldrake's work is crap, as far as I can tell, because as a theory it is entirely unconnected to any actual science. He invented a term, "morphic resonance", that is supposed to explain a wide variety of disparate phenomenon. This is pure crackpottery, since morphic resonance as a concept is entirely unconncected to known physical science. Whether the experiments he runs for things like staring and telepathy are valid or not, I have no idea. But if they are valid science, then the explanation for the phenomena are likely to be found in known theoretical frameworks and not some sort of arbitrary magic.
Since Sheldrake is so far out in left field and disconnected from mainstream science, there are only two possibilities: either he is a pseudoscientific crank, or he is some kind of misunderstood genius who will eventually revolutionize science once his ideas are accepted. I acknowledge that there is a possibility that the latter is the case, but it seems to me the odds are very very small.
Comment by mtraven — May 24, 2007 @ 9:05 pm
May 24th, 2007 at 9:23 pm
Materialists believe in the fundamental unity of the universe — it's all just one big wave equation. So what? The problem is, in order to say anything intelligent about the universe, or even perceive it at all, you have to break it up into pieces. So, to use a form of argument you were using earlier, for practical purposes the only observable universe is one made out of separate pieces.
I really can't figure out what you think you are arguing for or against. Every physicist knows the stuff you are saying, but for the most part they don't think that it implies some sort of magic holism, or intelligent design, or any other form of woo. Some do, to be sure. But at its base quantum physics is just as mechanical (that is, it's a system of mathematical laws that describes the evolution and structure of the universe) as any other kind of physics.
Comment by mtraven — May 24, 2007 @ 9:23 pm
May 24th, 2007 at 9:27 pm
I am very happy to hear you hear this.
Let me repeat the key line:
Yes. Excellent clarity of thought there. You would not believe the amount of equivocation I hear on this.
And since you have said this without any weasel words or muddle, I suspect you also will understand the other half of the reality without much argument. To wit:
All we have access to is our subjective reality. All thoughts, emotions, and sensations appear within that subjective reality. This INCLUDES the thoughts that constitute notions of objectivity, of an independent objective reality, of a physical reality. All of those notions may well be true and correct, but we still do not have direct access to them. All we have, all any of us have, is our consciousness or, in other words, our subjectivity. And even the staunchest rationalist is in that same boat too — his or her subjectivity may be a true and correct mental model called "objectivity" but it is built out of subjective experience just like everyone else's world.
Did I state that clearly enough? Do you agree with it?
Also, I would like to send you some dead-tree (printed) reading material. You are an obviously smart and curious individual and I think you will find it intriguing. If you email me at mcromer at blast dot com and give me a postal address or a PO box I'll make the photocopies and send them to you.
It's fascinating reading, I promise, and I think you will be impressed with it. It's an extract from the academic imprint Irreducible Mind. And Keiths the offer is still open to you as well — I did make the offer to you because I was impressed with your posts here. And anyone else, whether materialist or not, I will send out a copy to the first five people who request it free of charge who drop me an email in addition to keiths and mtraven. OK, if you live overseas I might need you to cover the postage. . .
Comment by mcromer — May 24, 2007 @ 9:27 pm
May 24th, 2007 at 10:49 pm
Yes and no. I don't think we have "direct access" to anything, including our own subjective experiences. Our consciousness and subjective experience is an ongoing realtime construct. Objectivity is also a construct, as you suggest above, and science is basically just a very good technique for achieving a certain kind of viewpoint, one that transcends immediate personal experience (gaining certain kinds of representational power in the process, and losing others). But they are both constructs. There isn't any such thing as direct, unmediated experience.
Comment by mtraven — May 24, 2007 @ 10:49 pm
May 25th, 2007 at 12:48 am
That is going far beyond what the data of quantum mechanics tells us.
What the data tells us is that the quantum wave equations will generate probabilities that match the probabilities of our measurements of quantum systems. The data also tells us that naive physicalism is completely wrong, because it will not match our measurements.
In the same way, general relativity provides equations that allow us to predict measurements taken at relativistic speeds.
So we have matched what physics says about the universe precisely with what mystics say about the nature of the universe. That the apparently diverse phenomena are simply manifestations of an absolute underlying unity and oneness, whether you choose to call that oneness God, Consciousness, the absolute Self, or the universal wave equation.
They look like pieces for a while (consider physics before quantum mechanics) but eventually it is seen that all the pieces are actually manifestations of a Unity.
The same thing happens with personal consciousness. It appears to be a separate self in a world of separate selves, but through self examination it is eventually seen to be one with everything. Mystics of all religions and no religions have stated this. I'm partial to Albert Einstein's formulation:
A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
The observation of the behavior of the separate pieces makes it eventually clear that they are not really separate after all. That's pretty damn profound.
An exploration of your own consciousness eventually shows the exact same thing – you are one with the universe. Thus mysticism lies at the core of most religious traditions, although usually heavily distorted over time as institutional power-seeking and control-mentality takes over. A very interesting thing that exploration of the inner universe and the outer universe points at exactly the same truth. Even atheist skeptics like Sam Harris and Susan Blackmore who have practiced consciousness exploration say the same thing – the separate self that you think of as you is an illusion.
There is nothing "magic" about holism. It is simply an observable aspect of the universe. We look at chemistry and see brute observables which cannot be deduced from physics. We look at cell behavior and processes and see brute observables which cannot be deduced from chemistry. And on up. Sure, the reductionists insist that there are no new factors involved, and that what looks like evolving field behavior (ie: epigenesis) is really contact mechanics and the most basic fields of physics. But they can provide no evidence for this position. Whereas Sheldrake's theory of emerging and evolving holisms (morphic field theory) provides testable predictions of new emerging behaviors, and has been tested with a considerable amount of success (see the new edition of A New Science of Life and the Presence of the Past, for specific tests of morphic field theory as well as his published research on psi phenomena).
The question of intelligent design cannot be addressed simply until we have a good definition of what human intelligence and creativity is. I think that is why the ID research program has barely gotten off the ground, compared with psi research which is active and diverse and ongoing.
I am not sure what the purpose of the word "woo" is here, it appears to be a Randi pejorative and does not appear in any of the online reference dictionaries I have checked with the meaning you appear to be intending.
I am not sure that mathematical is a good synonym for mechanical.
Comment by mcromer — May 25, 2007 @ 12:48 am
May 25th, 2007 at 1:20 am
I'm not sure what you mean by that.
His theory of morphic resonance is that the regularities we call the "laws of nature" evolve through time along with the universe. So it is a kind of meta-theory about the nature of natural laws and the nature of the universe. It is also a theory describing the formation of new holistic properties through time. It is also directly testable, and has been tested.
I'm not sure why you have such an animosity towards it.
Science never explains anything. However theories can provide conceptual models, and provide testable predictions. Morphic resonance is a model where the regularities of the universe evolve through time from the most basic which are virtually unchanging, to higher and higher levels of regularity which are more fluid and variable and quickly changing.
The important thing is that it provides testable predictions, and has in fact been tested, with largely positive results.
What do you mean by this exactly?
I disagree most vigorously. The known frameworks have failed to account for observable but holistic phenomena like behavior, sensory integration, psi, epigenesis, memory, and much more. At some point one gets tired of hashing through all the epicycles and looks for a new framework.
Sheldrake was considered a top caliber biologist. His groundbreaking biochemical research on morphogenesis and Auxin was published in Nature and Scientific American as well as a host of more specialized journals. He led a research program at Oxford.
His ideas about morphogenetic fields have a substantial history in developmental biology, so they are hardly "disconnected". What he brought to the table was clarity that these fields were not simply to be thought of as a conceptual device but were actually causal in morphogenesis. Also he created an evolutionary framework for them.
I'm sure the odds looked very very small that Wegener was right, and Semmelweis, and Barry Marshall. Certainly they were reviled for crackpottery.
The important thing about science is that we can test ideas. That is what research is for. When the results come back, that tells us something important. And so for a scientist to ignore the results of research is the most cardinal of sins.
What Sheldrake brought to the table that is so important is raising the question of the nature of natural law.
In a universe that was born fifteen billion years ago, that has evolved successively through time, from hydrogen and helium, to more complex elements through nuclear reactions, to more and more complex chemical and geologic systems, to the remarkable and astounding phenomena of living organisms, where evolution began to involve genetic inheritance, and new behaviors, eukaryotic cells, multicellular organisms, on into the evolution of vertebrates with more and more complex behavior and perceptions, on to the human realm where evolution leapt again into the realm of culture and language and technology and science and art and spirituality. An incredible vision of evolution. And Sheldrake asked the question: does it make sense to speak of eternal laws in a universe that came into existence from a singularity fifteen billion years ago? Or is it possible that the "laws" or nature are more like habits, some deeply engrained with essentially no change or variation, others newer and more labile.
For a full sense of Sheldrake's theory, read his book The Presence of the Past first. It should be available in your university library. His earlier book A New Science of Life has been revised, but should be read afterwards because it posts the results of many tests of morphic theory.
Comment by mcromer — May 25, 2007 @ 1:20 am
May 25th, 2007 at 1:33 am
Then what is there? (I am not disagreeing with you) What does the word "I" really mean? It is the consciousness through which flows everything. You cannot say what it is, it cannot be defined, but it cannot be denied. Thoughts cannot encompass it, because thoughts appear within it.
But you are very very right to see that all these things are constructs. You are leaps and bounds beyond all the muddle-headedness out there. The statement from your blog that theism and atheism are both incorrect is dead-to-rights. The best that any epistemologic statement can do is point at the unutterable and undefinable reality. It is the same thing we face in moments of utter unspeakable grandeur, like cutting the umbilical cord of your newborn child, or making love for the first time, or simply being a child, running through a field and feeling the wind and sunshine, utterly unburdened with a heavy, conceptualized false sense of self.
Comment by mcromer — May 25, 2007 @ 1:33 am
May 25th, 2007 at 3:19 am
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Comment by Vladimir Krondan — May 25, 2007 @ 3:19 am
May 25th, 2007 at 10:52 am
"So, there you have it. Resistance to science springs from a clash of experimental or observational evidence with childhood intuition about the world, coupled with what political or religious community we embrace."
So there ya have it! Whew! It's a lot tidier than I thought!
I now have a ready-made explanation for scientists' resistance to scientific ideas. Scientists who resist scientific ideas are retarded ("childish"), but not stupid, malicious or abnormal.
Ironically enough, cognitive and developmental scientists have also reported that children are "promiscuous psychologizers."
How about another option that resists the "scientific" idea of "promiscuous psychology"
Resistance to scientific ideas is absolutely indispensable to the advance of scientific ideas. If scientists didn't resolutely resist certain "scientific ideas" scientists themselves would continue to believe in ideas that are worse than "childish," but really stupid, malicious, and even "abnormal."
Or maybe I just need to consult a psychologist?
Comment by Rock — May 25, 2007 @ 10:52 am
May 25th, 2007 at 10:56 am
Nah. We love you the way you are. Besides, even if you have a few screws that need tightening, remember that Seneca once said, "there is no great genius without a tinge of insanity." I have read your writings for four years. I put you in the genius category.
Sal
Comment by Salvador T. Cordova — May 25, 2007 @ 10:56 am
May 25th, 2007 at 11:09 am
LOL Salvador T. Cordova, I think you just politely told me I'm nuts.
Yeh, I'm as nutty as a pinon tree.
And I could have saved you the effort of reading through all my blather. If you'd just asked me I would have told you I was a genius.
Comment by Rock — May 25, 2007 @ 11:09 am
May 25th, 2007 at 11:35 am
mtraven wrote:
Another way of putting this is to say I'm not a materialist. Well, duh.
It seems your 'argument' is that:
If somone is not a materialist, then they're guilty of improperly assessing materialist accounts of mind by irrelevantly assessing materialist accounts of mind's origins.
What are non-materialists going to say in reply? Well, a couple of things.
1) In the case of understanding what mind is, assessment of origin questions are anything but irrelevant in the materialist v anti-materialist debate;
and
2) Your 'argument' is simply in effect a re-statement of the materialist position, not an argument for it.
The question I was addressing was moral beliefs. But it could have been beliefs about chemistry or economic history or geography. In those latter cases, we do not assess the validity of the relevant beliefs by focusing on the general origin of beliefs of that type. So when materialists respond to my question—-Did science tell you that such-and-such conduct is morally wrong?—-by offering to give a scientific account of the genesis of moral belief, they are in fact guilty of the genetic fallacy.
That is, they're guilty of that fallacy unless their main purpose in focusing on the origins of moral beliefs is to deny that moral beliefs have any real cognitive validity to them at all, as a large number of materialists have indeed openly held.
See here and here for some notable exemplars of this sort of materiaist account of ethics.
Comment by stunney — May 25, 2007 @ 11:35 am
May 25th, 2007 at 11:37 am
The commentors above are absolutely correct.
The armchair analysis on the part of academics on why non-academics are so deluded as to disagree with academics is obvious self-serving in-group apologetics. And we've seen SO MUCH of it of late, ranging from "What's the matter with Kansas" to "The God Delusion" and now this latest transparent twaddle. I see it every day on the SEED scienceblogs. Every group engages in this kind of ingroup back-patting and outgroup tut-tutting, and scientists are no different, except perhaps less able than many to see through their sociological prejudices. . .
Comment by mcromer — May 25, 2007 @ 11:37 am
May 25th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
In pieces,
No. Science merely describes. Moral values may be informed by science, but are not dictated by science. A materialist is just as capable of consistently uttering that statement. Many concepts can be discussed beyond the bounds of the scientific method–even by materialists.
Certainly, someone could introduce that fallacy, but it is not inevitable. As the response to the next statement should make clear.
This seems quite an overstatement. It is more than possible for a materialist to ponder the origin of moral beliefs without committing a genetic fallacy. In this view, morality might be seen as subjective and due to a material cause, but that doesn't necessarily reduce its cognitive validity. Mammals love and nurture their children. A materialist may point to the plausible evolutionary origin of this feeling without rejecting its validity with regards to their own children.
That is, unless I misunderstand what you mean by "cognitive validity"; but regardless, loving your children is just as valid as not liking a poke in the eye. If pain has "cognitive validity", then so do love and moral predilections.
Comment by Zachriel — May 25, 2007 @ 12:23 pm
May 25th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
Zachriel and Grendelkhan,
grendelkhan wrote:
What about understanding itself? Is understanding well understood in entirely materialistic terms? Also, how about avian consciousness?
Or, more famously, bat consciousness?
Zachriel wrote:
Problem is, Zachriel, many materialists do take the view that moral beliefs lack cognitive validity. That's why I linked to two articles that demonstrate that, with the substance of which most people who've ever taken a half decent undergraduate course in moral philosophy would be familiar.
Well read the articles I linked to. Here they are again
:
Moral Skepticism
Moral Cognitivism vs. Non-Cognitivism
Zachriel, I don't know how sheltered a life you've led, and so this may come as a shock to you, but there is a huge amount of immoral behavior that humans have indulged in throughout recorded history. Sorry to be the one to break the bad news to you.
Some humans like to sexually molest children. Some humans like poking people in the eye. Presumably evolutionary naturalism explains that too, does it? After all, evolutionary naturalism can explain anything and everything. Morality. Immorality. Rationality. Irrationality. Beauty. Ugliness. War. Peace.
There's no doubt that one can be an atheist and a very good person or that one can be a theist and a very bad person. The difficulty with atheism, for many people, is not that, but rather this: that it seems to provide no objective basis for attributing moral goodness or moral badness. Moral goodness and badness are not properties detectable by natural scientific investigation. They are, rather, normative properties, and it's hard for many people (including many atheists such as J. L. Mackie) to understand how there can be objectively normative properties if materialism is the correct account of the world.
Some philosophically sophisticated materialists adopt moral anti-realism. They bite the bullet, and hold that our different attitudes towards rapists compared with our attitudes towards tsunamis don't involve any objective normative properties, since there are no such properties. They readily admit that if materialism is true, then our deepest moral convictions are not true, but are (roughly) adaptive illusions. Many naturalistic thinkers will answer the question of morality by saying that all there is to moral obligations and values is the functioning of rational instincts and desires.
The first problem with this reply is that instincts, dispositions, and desires vary tremendously among humans–some are instinctively aggressive, others instinctively deferential and compliant, some are extremely egoistic and cruel, others loving and altruistic. They vary from ethnic cleansing to caring for lepers.
The second problem is that if reason (the 'rational' part of 'rational instincts') is only instrumental—that is, if reason only enters the picture as the process by which agents deliberate about and choose between various possible means to their various ends, then the naturalist is left having to face the fact that some people's ends are truly horrifying from a moral point of view. But in that case, one can't reduce morality to the ends people happen to be disposed to pursue, since those ends include ridding Europe of Jews.
If, on the other hand, reason enters into the picture by actually adjudicating which ends ought to be pursued and which ought not to be, then one is back in a vicious circle. One has smuggled moral reason and moral judgement in to sort out the varying ends between which the naturalist, contemplating a factual description of the great variety of people's
dispositions and desires, must choose in order to give any remotely plausible account of the content of morality.
The biological perspective is simply that people have different urges to do different things. But biology provides no criteria for deciding why one set of urges should be labelled more 'moral' than another. We would be left describing the atrocities of the Pol Pot regime as yet another `interesting' manifestation of humankind's factual dispositions.
Similarly, the attempt to derive morality from evolution is logically flawed. Evolution is simply a descriptive theory. Morality is a prescriptive theory—it PREscribes certain kinds of conduct for humans, and PROscribes others. But if evolutionary biology is to explain morality, it must show the link between morality and adaptive behavior. The trouble with this is that a very large range of human behavior is agreed to be immoral, while evolution has to hold that nearly all behavior derives from the adaptive features of our genetic makeup. From this it would follow that much, perhaps even all, immoral behavior is adaptive. But then adaptiveness cannot be that in terms of which moral (as against immoral) behavior is defined, or that from which specifically moral (as against immoral) behavior springs.
Some naturalists are prepared to bite the bullet about this. That is, they are ready to say that there is no such thing as morality in any robust sense. There are just various human desires and human inclinations to talk a certain way about them. Morality, if the term is to be retained at all, simply refers to whatever happens to be the majority of, or most commonly possessed, sets of dispositions and ways of speaking with regard to inter-human conduct.
The problem with this view is that it falls foul of naturalism's most basic starting point—human experience. Naturalism privileges science as a form of knowledge because it relies on the most immediate data yielded by our consciousness of the world. Among these data are most certainly the deliverances of our sensory and perceptual abilities. We experience a patch of green stuff and call it grass. We hear a sound and interpret it as indicating a wave is moving at a certain speed through a large body of air molecules. We look at a dial and determine by its measurement the mass of a subatomic particle. Etc.
But these are not the only kind of data of consciousness. There is also the utter conviction that shooting defenceless innocent children as they attempt to escape (as happened at Beslan) is something we are morally bound to condemn—that it is objectively prohibited to act thus, whether anyone subjectively wants to or not. There is the absolute certainty we find our conscious mind giving us that leaving a man to die of thirst in the desert while driving off in a full water-tanker is an abhorrent act of callousness that violates an ineluctable moral obligation (unless one is racing to save the lives of others who would die if you stopped to help—in that case one's obligation is different–saving the others–but it's still an obligation).
In other words, naturalism rests its case on the sheer force and given-ness of sensory experience. But that force and given-ness is at least, if not more, present in the case of people's consciousness with respect to major moral duties and moral values. One is more ready to attribute an experience of green to optical illusion or bodily malfunction (such as color-blindness) than to give up as 'illusory' the idea that one must not kill kids or leave dying men in the desert. One is more ready, in a laboratory, to attribute the position of the dial to a random electrical disturbance, than one is to attribute the notion that we should not rape our grandmothers to an illusion, or a mere lack of desire to do so.
Naturalism, in order to dismiss morality as a projection or illusion with no real objective claim upon us, ends up having to deny the validity of the only thing that would even render itself (naturalism) plausible in the first place—the deliverances and character of the subjective conscious experiences of human beings.
Naturalism derives whatever plausibility it has from our predictable external sensory experiences. Naturalists thus believe that Jupiter exists and has a certain shape and size, etc. There may be some people who think Jupiter has a very bad case of acne, or is streaked with paint, or is where the god called Jupiter lives, or that Jupiter is smaller than the Earth because when they looked at it through a telescope once, it looked smaller. No matter, beliefs about Jupiter may vary somewhat; but the naturalist will say, regardless of that variation among the set of beliefs about Jupiter, here are the objective facts about Jupiter. And they make their case that those are objective facts because typical sensory experiences relating to Jupiter are such-and-such.
Okay. But the experiential data of humans is not limited to sensory data. Most people experience that they are strongly obligated by moral conscience, and that conscience dictates that burning babies for fun is absolutely prohibited. This includes unhappy parents who may, in extreme circumstances, actually feel a strong inclination to throw the screaming baby of theirs into a furnace, and even imagine momentarily that they'd take pleasure in doing that. Still, overriding such feelings is their experience of an absolute objective prohibition against doing so. And so they don't do it (hopefully).
But, by parity of reasoning with the case of beliefs about Jupiter, this should yield an objective moral fact, just as that case yields an objective sensory fact. Both are rock solidly grounded in very common, typical and predictable experiential data. In fact, there are very possibly more people who harbor beliefs about Jupiter—beliefs about how far it is from Earth, say—which are non-standard relative to the science about Jupiter, than there are people who hold non-standard views about the proposition that it's morally wrong to burn babies for fun. And so the Argument from Disagreement against morality's objectivity is not all that cogent, in fact.
So the naturalist attempt to deny the objectivity of morality undercuts not only morality, but naturalism itself, since naturalism rests upon very common, predictable experiential data.
Suppose there is a Satanist who wants to burn babies. He has lots of money and offers 10 million dollars to any mother of a newborn infant who will hand over the infant to be burned alive. Mutual benefit seems assured. Most moms of newborns would love to get 10 million bucks. But most would not hand over their infant children for Satanic sacrifice; not for 10 million bucks. Not for anything. Even if guaranteed against criminal charges.
And it's not just their own babies they feel this about. It's all babies. They believe it's morally wrong to burn any babies for fun, any place, any time, even if it's the babies of people they strongly dislike.
This type of intuition goes way beyond inherent purposes or social utility. Neither of those properly accounts for our moral experience—the experience, as it were of Good and Evil.
This moral experience cannot be plausibly explained by evolutionary naturalism. It is, in my view, a decisive objection to that theory if taken as a complete worldview, even if it admits of no strict demonstration. In that regard it's like a toothache"”–you know it's there but you can't absolutely demonstrate it's there to anyone else. You just have to wait until they get a toothache of their own. (One can substitute orgasms for toothaches if you find the latter too depressing an example.)
Comment by stunney — May 25, 2007 @ 2:40 pm
May 25th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
Stunney, your analysis of morality is deeply flawed in my humble opinion. There is no such thing as objective morality. You keep bringing up burning babies as an example of an act that everybody always considers immoral. But this is false. It is simply how we feel now because we have been taught to feel this way. Millions of humans, including many babies, have been slaughtered in human history without the perpetrators considering it immoral at all. In the old days, any act was permitted towards people outside of one's own tribe. Behavior was considered immoral if it violated the tribe's mores and etiquettes, which have always varied in time and place. Some tribes were cannibals; others weren't, perhaps because they thought it would bring bad luck (maybe someone was observed to be struck by lightning after eating human flesh). Need I mention slavery again? We have an innate tendency to get upset when we see something that violates the tribe's rules (which we have been taught from an early age onwards, and which are partially arbitrary, partially adaptive). This feeling of "moral outrage" is very functional because it promotes group stability.
Comment by Raevmo — May 25, 2007 @ 3:21 pm
May 25th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
mcromer wrote:
I am. Sure it's not a good synonym, that is.
I keep urging the materialists at TT to ponder what the Wykeham Professor of Logic from 1979 to 1992 at my alma mater, Oxford University, (my co-religionist) Michael Dummett has written in his latest book, Thought and Reality, which gets at the heart of the matter of whether mind or matter has ontological priority. I provided some key excerpts here and here.
Notice that Dummet asserts precisely your position, mcromer, both on a mathematical model being a far cry from an instantiated mechanics, and on there being no difference between a world that is always completely devoid of consciousness and a non-existent world.
Materialists wonder how illuminating it is to say that I am typing these words because I will that action.
But, how illuminating is it to say that it's false or not 'really true' that I'm typing these words because I will that action?
In other words, the materialist embarrassingly takes one of most obvious and fundamental 'givens' of human experience—that we often do things by intentional freely-willed agency—and declares it to be instead a huge mystery which we ought to be grateful to the materialist for resolving by introducing us to the much more illuminating science of brain mechanics.
Of course, it's only a huge mystery in the first place if one is a materialist.
Comment by stunney — May 25, 2007 @ 3:29 pm
May 25th, 2007 at 3:48 pm
Raevmo wrote:
In fact, the God of the Old Testament commands the slaughter of babies.
For example, I Samuel 15:2-3 :
Appalling, isn't it?
Comment by keiths — May 25, 2007 @ 3:48 pm
May 25th, 2007 at 3:48 pm
raevmo wrote:
Guess what, mate—-it's not in mine.
Thank you for confirming what I said to mtraven and Zachriel. Namely that your position is quite common among materialists.
That's not the example I brought up, sunshine. The example I brought up was burning babies for fun.
Two points:
First, I pointed out to Zachriel that lots of immoral behavior has occurred. He seemed to be blissfully unaware of this fact.
Second, your point is completely irrelevant. My position is that morality is objective. So telling me that lots of people have believed things which may turn out to be objectively morally wrong is no more a point against the objectivity of morality than telling me that lots of people have believed in geocentrism and/or in Newtonian absolute space and time is a point against the objectivity of cosmological science.
Let me repeat: your point is completely irrelevant. My position is that morality is objective. So telling me that lots of people have believed things which may turn out to be objectively morally wrong is no more a point against the objectivity of morality than telling me that lots of people have believed in geocentrism and/or Newtonian absolute space and time is a point against the objectivity of cosmological science.
Comment by stunney — May 25, 2007 @ 3:48 pm
May 25th, 2007 at 3:58 pm
Don't be absurd, man. You use examples of human moral outrage to make your point that morality is objective. But when I point out that the circumstances that trigger such feelings are highly variable, then the observations are suddenly irrelevant.
You also said:
I believe I just did. You may not believe so, but hey, that's irrelevant.
Comment by Raevmo — May 25, 2007 @ 3:58 pm
May 25th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
That's one way to spin it. Another possibility is that what we are taught is that which is intended to keep the big boys in power or at least comfortable with society's prevailing metaphysical POV.
Comment by Bradford — May 25, 2007 @ 4:09 pm
May 25th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Bradford:
Yep. Both are possible, even simultaneously.
Comment by Raevmo — May 25, 2007 @ 4:13 pm
May 25th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
stunney wrote:
That's a convenient strawman, stunney.
Here's the actual exchange:
You wrote:
Science is not agnostic about the existence of the moral conscience. It exists, and it is being studied.
As I wrote:
It would be fallacious to claim that science legitimates a particular system of morality by studying its origins, but I'm unaware of anyone in this thread who has made such a claim.
Comment by keiths — May 25, 2007 @ 4:16 pm
May 25th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
Normally I don't reach back this far in a thread, but I gotta reply to this.
The statement I was looking at was
Random bits aren't "intrinsically understandable" by a rational mind. There's nothing there to extract. They contain no more "information", in the sense defined above, than no bits at all do.
So, according to you, random bits contain no information. Where did I go wrong?
As for mcromer, you claim that scientists are just as childish and insular as any in-group, but you leave out the fact that science is no more complicated than it needs to be, that anyone can "join the in-group" simply by reading some books (or nowadays, a few FAQs), and that there's a difference between explaining why someone else is wrong and just accusing them of arrogance. If you tell me the moon's made of green cheese, and I tell you you're wrong, I may be arrogant, but you're still wrong.
And finally, stunney says that he has a grip on objective morality, without which one can't say that torching babies is bad. You're right when you say that materialism doesn't provide an objective morality, and thus materialists don't have one–but here's the thing: neither do you. You may think you do, and I'm honestly quite curious about what you consider to be your basis for your morality, and the reason you consider it to be objective and absolute truth, but I'm pretty sure you don't really believe that. If you disagree, describe the basis and nature of your morality to me.
Comment by grendelkhan — May 25, 2007 @ 4:25 pm
May 25th, 2007 at 4:39 pm
Raevmo wrote:
Raevmo, here's what I wrote:
[Emphases added]
Raevmo, I don't think you understood the argument.
It goes like this:
P1. If naturalism is true, then morality reduces to natural facts about human psychology (in particular facts about what typical human beliefs and desires there are regarding inter-human conduct.)
P2. If morality reduces to natural facts about human psychology, then morality is not objective, but varies with the variation in beliefs and desires regarding inter-human conduct.
P3. If morality is not objective, then a majority of people throughout history have been mistaken in believing that it is objective.
P4. If morality is not objective, then everyone who believes that burning babies for fun is objectively immoral is mistaken.
P5. If everyone who believes that burning babies for fun is objectively immoral is mistaken, then a fundamental human experience—that of feeling that it's absolutely prohibited by objective moral standards to burn babies for fun, regardless of whether anyone wants to burn babies for fun and regardless of whether anyone believes that they are under no such obligation—-is illusory.
P6. If the fundamental human experience referred to in P5 is illusory, then no fundamental human experience can be taken as epistemically sound.
C. If no fundamental human experience can be taken as epistemically sound, then there is no epistemically sound fundamental human experience that can justify belief in naturalism with any greater confidence than can justify the belief that burning babies for fun is objectively morally wrong.
As I said: the problem with your view is that it falls foul of naturalism's own most basic starting point"”–fundamental human experiences. I conclude that naturalism is, in the final analysis, an incoherent worldview.
Comment by stunney — May 25, 2007 @ 4:39 pm
May 25th, 2007 at 4:50 pm
That's one way to spin it. Another possibility is that what we are taught is that which is intended to keep the big boys in power or at least comfortable with society's prevailing metaphysical POV.
Note the power of the evolution of morality to make precise predictions.:lol:
Comment by Bradford — May 25, 2007 @ 4:50 pm
May 25th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
stunney, I think I agree with P1-P4.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by a "fundamental human experience".
Why not?
Comment by Raevmo — May 25, 2007 @ 4:58 pm
May 25th, 2007 at 5:09 pm
What you mock in disbelieve I see as an intellectual challenge. Each to his own, n'est ce pas?
Comment by Raevmo — May 25, 2007 @ 5:09 pm
May 25th, 2007 at 5:38 pm
Yes, I understand that. That's why I said it was an overstatement. You asserted that materialists were either committing a genetic fallacy or claiming that moral beliefs lack cognitive validity. Your use of the word "unless" precludes any other possibility, hence it is a false dilemma.
Where in Heaven would you get the idea that I was unaware of immoral behavior?
In all those paragraphs you failed to respond to the points I raised. Let's start with something simple. What do you mean by "cognitively valid" Is pain "cognitively valid"
–
I had composed a much longer post, but I think keiths captured the idea more concisely.
Comment by Zachriel — May 25, 2007 @ 5:38 pm
May 25th, 2007 at 6:25 pm
grendelkhan wrote:
Are you drunk?
I said: it is very plausible that an essential property of all information is that it is intrinsically understandable by a rational mind.
Do you think you're making a cogent point against my claim by pointing to an example of something that, according to you, is devoid of information?:roll:
Suppose I said an essential property of anything capable of being understood is that it be something that makes sense.
Would it be a cogent argument against that claim to point to an example of something that doesn't make sense—-let's call it "grendelkhan"—-and then say of the object called "grendelkhan" cannot be understood? Of course it wouldn't! "Grendelkhan" would be a) not a counter-example and b) a complete irrelevance to the original claim that anything understandable must be a thing that makes sense.
Is it any more a cogent argument against the claim that any information has as an essential property that it be understandable by a rational mind, to point to an example of something that's devoid of information just as "grendelkhan" is devoid of sense?
No, of course it's not! I mean, talk about being a 'bright'— sorry, I mean, talk about stupidity!
Pointing to something that's putatively devoid of information is a) obviously not a counter-example, since it's not an example of information at all per your hypothesis; and hence b) is a complete irrelevance to the original claim that anything that is information has, as an essential property, being understandable by a rational mind.
grendelkhan also said:
WTF? Where did I claim I had a 'grip' on objective morality. Are you completely wasted, boozed out of your brain, TGIF-mode?
Objective morality doesn't depend on me or anyone else having a 'grip' on it. That's because it's, and I'm going to say this slowly, O B J E C T I V E. Duh.
In other words, its content doesn't depend on any particular behavior, desire, or belief that any particular individual, or tribe, or larger population happens to exhibit. If it did, it wouldn't be objective morality. Get it?
As for me claiming to have a 'grip' on it, that's completely untrue. I never made that claim. I may be the devil incarnate and may love burning babies for the pleasure their screams give me. If so, that wouldn't say anything whatsoever about whether burning babies for fun is objectively immoral. Maybe the knowledge that it is objectively immoral adds to the pleasure I get from doing it—-er, I mean, the pleasure I would get from doing it if I were the devil incarnate.
Which, in fact, I'm not. Honest.
Dear oh dear. Objective morality isn't a possession I carry around with me. That's because it's objective. The same with Mount Everest. And the number 8. It's just there.
And just as I believe that Mount Everest and the number 8 exists objectively, so I believe that moral obligations and values exist objectively. I or other people may believe (falsely) that Mount Everest is higher than 43,000 feet and that the number 8 is prime. I or other people may believe (falsely) that it is morally legitimate to exterminate Jews or obliterate Teheran with nuclear weapons. That is, it may be that those actions are in fact objectively immoral (as I indeed think they are).
What the contents of the set of moral truths are doesn't depend on opinion any more than what the contents of the set of mathematical truths are depends on opinion.
How we justify our moral beliefs is a separate and complex matter. But as Godel proved in the case of mathematics, there are unprovable mathematical truths. So not being able to prove moral truths is not a huge strike, per se, against the idea that morality is objective. Proof in any form requires axioms. And I take it as axiomatic that burning babies for fun is morally wrong, regardless of what Genghis Khan might have thought about burning the babies of vanquished Central Asian villagers as a fun way to motivate loyalty to his rule, and regardless of what a Satanist might want to do with a furnace and a bunch of kindergarteners.
Comment by stunney — May 25, 2007 @ 6:25 pm
May 25th, 2007 at 6:52 pm
OK, so objective morality is a Godel-sentence. True but unprovable. I consider that a cop-out. Any belief can be proclaimed to be a Godel-sentence. I use this tactic myself sometimes, but as a joke – not as a serious argument.
Different religions do not agree on what they regard as objectively moral. Indeed, the intersection of all objective moralities is vanishingly small, perhaps even zero. What is a non-religious person to make of that?
Comment by Raevmo — May 25, 2007 @ 6:52 pm
May 25th, 2007 at 7:22 pm
Zachriel wrote:
What's the tertium quid?
If they believe as an objective fact that certain moral beliefs are cognitively valid, then they believe that there are correct moral propositions. But if there are such propositions, then materialism must be false, since the objective fact of the validity of those propositions isn't a material object or material fact, nor a component of a complete physical description of the world. That's because validity is an irreducibly normative property, not a property of matter.
Where? When you wrote:
but regardless, loving your children is just as valid as not liking a poke in the eye. If pain has "cognitive validity", then so do love and moral predilections.
You were implying that morality is a matter of human predilections. I think this is both false and explanatorily vacuous. Why? Because humanity also has a well known predilection for immoral behavior. Hence a) appealing to human predilection does nothing to distinguish moral from immoral behavior; and b) it explains nothing, because whatever humans do can be attributed to human predilections. You remember, the old falsifiable hypothesis that makes specific empirical predictions Thingie? 'Course you do!
No. But a belief that one is in pain when one is in pain is cognitively valid.
I often don't respond to points if they are so weak that they're not worth the time and effort of doing so. Yours were in that category.
He may have. Let's see, shall we?
You 'brights' are a hoot. We've got raevmo declaring, as many materialists do, that there are no objectively valid moral beliefs, and that all there is, is a bunch of varying and often contradictory moral beliefs. Then we have Zachriel insisting that materialists can too believe that moral beliefs are cognitively valid. And then keiths settles the issue, at least in principle, by declaring that science has discovered that conscience exists! (Actually, its existence may have been suspected even before the rise of science.)
And this scientifically studied conscience will be able to determine whether a given person's belief that it's morally legitimate, say, to have sex with one's young children even if they cry a lot at first, is a correct belief or incorrect, cognitively valid or invalid, true or false…. er, how?
Oh that's easy. Conscience is one bit of the brain. The validity or otherwise of that bit of the brain's moral assessments can be checked by examining other bits of other brains and some other bits of matter. And we can verify the results of those examinations by examining yet other bits of other brains and some other bits of matter.
Et cetera.
The moral is: all brain exams presuppose rational norms; they do not discover them.
Comment by stunney — May 25, 2007 @ 7:22 pm
May 25th, 2007 at 7:47 pm
Yes, you and I are absolutely in agreement there.
Comment by mcromer — May 25, 2007 @ 7:47 pm
May 25th, 2007 at 7:56 pm
The difference is, I have read those books and FAQs, while the vast majority of materialists have never read Irreducible Mind, The Presence of the Past, or Entangled Minds.
The latter two are almost certainly in your local university library, and the former probably will be within a year or so.
We are still in a scenario where professional scientists who are "skeptics" come to debate with scientific researchers into psi without even reading the material they are attacking.
Comment by mcromer — May 25, 2007 @ 7:56 pm
May 25th, 2007 at 9:26 pm
Are you capable of responding to me without resorting to this sort of childishness?
Okay, so you're positing: if it is information, then it is intrinsically understandable. So then, if it is not intrinsically understandable, it is not information.
So either your definition of information leads to me magically taking two entities which contain no information and squishing them together to create information, or your definition has a flaw in it. That was the point I was making, and that's why I used as an example something that was devoid of information as you defined it.
You can't claim that someone else is failing to live up to objective morality unless you know what that morality is. (If an objective morality exists and no one knows about it, does it still make a sound?) I've asked you before, and I ask again: how did you come to be aware of this objective morality, what does it consist of, and how do you know that you're right?
Comment by grendelkhan — May 25, 2007 @ 9:26 pm
May 25th, 2007 at 10:52 pm
First you said it was objective. Now you say it is axiomatic.
You just added "objective" to the formulation I had objected to. It seems you keep conflating the terms "valid", "correct" and "objective".
valid: well-grounded or justifiable : being at once relevant and meaningful
Many materialists would agree these are correct moral propositions: "love is better than hate", "compassion is better than envy", "wanton killing is wrong". Where they may disagree is with your claim that morality is objective. Rather, they might say these moral predilections are subjective, but widely shared and agreed upon. Hence valid and correct.
Humans may exhibit a great variance in possible behaviors, but it is not random. Humans share a great many values, and identifying these values (patterns) provide an explanatory framework for understanding human behavior. And that means you're wrong.
Then a belief that one is experiencing compassion is cognitively valid. And as people share many of the same beliefs about their moral predilections, they can forge these axioms into valid ethical systems.
I don't know what a 'bright' is, but I doubt I qualify. I am a slow (though earnest) learner.
Is there a reason why you misrepresented keiths' statement? He didn't say that science discovered conscience. Aspects of the human condition have been studied by philosophers for millenium before the advent of modern science. And in many cases, philosophy is still the most potent tool for understanding the human condition.
And here you are repeating a strawman that has already been discussed. Science doesn't determine the correctness of a moral view; it only describes it. People share many moral proclivities. They can then treat these as axioms to forge ethical systems.
Comment by Zachriel — May 25, 2007 @ 10:52 pm
May 25th, 2007 at 11:00 pm
Zachriel, I don't know where he gets it from, but he seems to have a thing for calling people who ask him difficult questions "brights". He keeps using that word, but I do not think it means what he thinks it means.
Comment by grendelkhan — May 25, 2007 @ 11:00 pm
May 25th, 2007 at 11:14 pm
A public service announcement…
A bright's version of "bright"= http://www.the-brights.net/vision/faq.html#1
Uncommon Descent's version = http://cedros.globat.com/~thebrites.org/MrEvolution/MrEvolution0705.html
Comment by Thought Provoker — May 25, 2007 @ 11:14 pm
May 25th, 2007 at 11:36 pm
Thought Provoker, I'm well aware of the existence of the Brights movement; stunney seems to fling the word around in order to label people and attack positions held by organizations that opponents have been unceremoniously stapled to, in addition to (if we're lucky) or rather than (if we're not) responding to anything anyone here actually said. It's a cheap trick, and as I said before, he keeps using that word, and I do not think it means what he thinks it means.
Comment by grendelkhan — May 25, 2007 @ 11:36 pm
May 26th, 2007 at 1:10 am
stunney's argument, boiled down, seems to be: because I believe so very strongly that x is objectively wrong, then it must be so, because I believe that proposition so strongly that if it turns out to not be the case, then I'm incapable of believing in anything else.
The problems with this sort of reasoning are obvious to everyone else, I trust. The rest of us are not burdened with these peculiar cognitive limitations. We're perfectly capable of dealing with the differing ontological statuses of prohibitions on murder and chairs.
But, since you believe so strongly that there is an objective morality, tell us what it is! I know we aren't supposed to throw babies into furnaces, but presumably there's more to it than that. Do we have to love our neighbor as ourself? What does that mean, operationally? Do we have to honor the sabbath? If so, which one? Not steal? If so, who gets to define property rights and what do you do about the libertarians who view taxation as theft? And speaking of dead babies, what does your absolute and objective moral code say about the morally divisive issue of abortion, which hinges on the definition of when a fetus becomes a baby? If there's an objective answer to that it would certainly clear things up, so please let us know.
And also please explain how if there is an objective morality that we all have access to, how come some people seem to not realize this? In your view, if someone holds a view of morality different from yours, they are just mistaken, as if they believed that 6*7 = 38. But why is it that you have a better handle on objective morality than they do, and how can you demonstrate this to the rest of us?
Comment by mtraven — May 26, 2007 @ 1:10 am
May 26th, 2007 at 1:36 am
grendelkhan wrote:
It depends on how ridiculous your comments are.
In other threads, and in this one, I've stated my view that there isn't any such thing as 'informationless stuff'. Whatever entities you care to mention, even if it's just a couple of photons, carry or contain some information—information relating to their spin, momentum, position, etc.
So show me some stuff and I'll show you it possesses information. Even black holes emit radiation at their event horizons.
Or so Stephen Hawking assured me when he dropped in for a few wee drams and some belly-aching about the rigors of weightlessness.
Actually, you can claim anything at all without knowing what the truths of objective morality are.
For most of human history, nobody knew anything about the Big Bang. But it still made a 'sound'.
How does anyone become aware of any objective truth, what it consists of, and how does anyone know they're right?
In general, by rational reflection upon ineluctable experiences.
The ineluctable experience I draw upon for one of my moral beliefs is that burning babies for fun violates the voice of my conscience to such a degree, that I would sooner believe that my right hand is an alien transplant outfitted with a transmitter sending superluminal signals to Andromeda about what I've eaten in the previous 72 hours, than believe it is not objectively immoral to burn babies for fun.
So I start where naturalism starts—with the most indubitable facts of one's own experience of life. And go on from there.
Comment by stunney — May 26, 2007 @ 1:36 am
May 26th, 2007 at 1:54 am
This discussion is way too long, but here are responses to some random snippets of mcromers:
me:
Gravity may be nonlocal but it isn't magical, and there's nothing holistic about it.
mcromer:
But that isn't holism, that is straight-up Newtonian physics. Holism, to me, implies that there is some high-level phenomenon that is irreducible to more basic forces. But in Newtonian gravity, every object in the universe is exerting a force on every other object, and they combine in a strictly linear way. Einstein complicated this picture somewhat but not in any way that adds more holism to the picture.
mcromer:
Look up Max Tegmark. But it doesn't matter, since science is not about "mechanics", but about finding observable regularties in nature. "Mechanics" is what a lot of these regularities look like to us, at a certain scale. But at the quantum scale the intuitions we bring based on human-scale physics break down, which is why quantum mechanics doesn't seem very mechanical. But it's the mathematics that matters, and frankly trying to draw philosophical and mystical conclusions from it without doing the math is an exercise in futility.
mcromer:
Um, yeah. But the problem is, there are hundreds of thousands of crackpots and only a few Semmelweises, and nobody knows at time x which ones are going to be proved right in x+20 years. That's why I said it's possible that Sheldrake is a genius, but I wouldnt give it good odds.
mcromer:
No, it isn't. Materialism is a form of monism. It's theists who seem to have a problem with oneness, since they are metaphysical dualists.
me:
Gravity is just as mechanical as the little molecular machines.
mcromer:
I don't know how to respond to this, you seem very confused about the nature of physics, both quantum and classical. Molecular machines are mostly driven by electromagnetic forces, which are just as "holistic" as gravity.
I suggest putting down the Sheldrake and reading a good intro physics book instead.
Comment by mtraven — May 26, 2007 @ 1:54 am
May 26th, 2007 at 2:42 am
Zachriel wrote:
I did not say it is axiomatic. I said I take it as axiomatic.
However, if you think the point you're making is a good one, here's what I suggest you do. Write an article whose conclusion is that there are no objective truths in mathematics because mathematicians use axioms in proving their theorems.
Ah. So what you really meant was, "cognitively valid but not, you know, objectively cognitively valid."
You're hilarious.
Talk to raevmo. He's the one who reminded us of all the terrible things that used to be done by people whose moral beliefs were very different from ours.
But since, according to your position, it's subjective and widely agreed upon in Saudi Arabia that it's immoral for women to go drinking in bars, and it's subjective and widely agreed upon in New York that it's not immoral for women to go drinking in bars, can we conclude it's a valid or correct belief that it's immoral for women to go drinking in bars, and that it's a valid or correct belief that it's not immoral for women to go drinking in bars?
If so, then you're obviously emptying the notion of any useful meaning. It would be like me saying, among the scientific community, it's widely agreed that life began on Earth several billion years ago, hence that belief is correct. And it's widely agreed among American evangelicals that it began much more recently; hence that belief is also correct.
As I said, you're hilarious.
Oh, this is after me pointing out to you a) that human behavior varies a lot, and b) that despite this variation, the vast majority of people believe that burning babies for fun is objectively immoral. And then you say that this very thing that I said, but now that you say it, means I'm wrong?:lol:
You're hilarious.
What about experiencing hatred of blacks? By your reasoning, that would be 'cognitively valid' too.
You're hilarious.:lol:
Yeah, it was called 'segregation'. And before that, 'slavery'.
And how!:grin:
Aren't they all!:smile:
Bingo. That's because it cannot detect normative properties. Which is why I said:
The moral is: all brain exams presuppose rational norms; they do not discover them.
And had previously said:
The 20th century was the most scientific of all to date. It was also the bloodiest, and most polluted.
Some folks revel in the slogan, 'Science is as science does'. Well, what science does includes figuring out how to make better cluster bombs, gas chambers, and generally sucking insatiably at the tit of the military-industrial complex, producing orgies of irrationality in Vietnam, Iraq, etc, and in the mindless consumer culture that ignores the environmental damage, exploitation, and colossal waste that goes with it.
How do you like them apples?
Oh, you don't approve of all that? Why?
Did science tell you why?
That last question was rhetorical, whose point was this, er, one:
"Science doesn't determine the correctness of a moral view; it only describes it."
I didn't count up the number of posts it took you to get there, but it was too many.
Comment by stunney — May 26, 2007 @ 2:42 am
May 26th, 2007 at 3:03 am
mtraven, when you said that
I thought you were exaggerating, or kidding. But then he said
Which is (shorter stunney): it's objectively true because I'm really sure about it, and I feel really strongly. It's nothing but revelation dressed up in fancy words like "ineluctable experience".
The problem with revelation, of course, is that people get all sorts of revelations, and stunney has yet to explain why his revelations about "objective morality" are superior to revelations telling him to put an infant in a microwave oven.
Comment by grendelkhan — May 26, 2007 @ 3:03 am
May 26th, 2007 at 3:20 am
mtraven's argument, boiled down, seems to be: because he believes so very strongly that evolutionary science is objectively true and that the Biblical account of human origins is literally false, then it must be so; because he believes those dual propositions so strongly that if it turns out to not be the case, he would have no confidence in the epistemic soundness of his experiences of the world in general.
My argument is similar, but stronger.
The perception of the objective immorality of baby-burning for purposes of entertainment is more commonly and more forcefully grounded in human experience than the set of data any scientist could proffer as evidence for the propositions of evolutionary science.
So, if you are going to insist that we should have confidence in the interpretation of data (fossils, etc) proposed by evolutionary scientists as disclosing an objective scientific truth, then at least that level of confidence should be accorded to the interpretation of data (consciences, etc) proposed by human beings in general as regards whether burning babies for fun is morally wrong as disclosing an objective moral truth.
Comment by stunney — May 26, 2007 @ 3:20 am
May 26th, 2007 at 3:31 am
gengiskhan wrote:
What?
You mean you don't believe in science because of the ineluctable character of certain experiences had in labs, etc?
If that's the case, smartboy, what's the point of empirical testing?
It appears you are cluless about how incoherent your views are.
Don't you value logical consistency?
Or have you just been drinking again?
Yeah, I'd say kool-aid by the looks of it.
Comment by stunney — May 26, 2007 @ 3:31 am
May 26th, 2007 at 8:05 am
In mathematics, axioms are not objective, but assumed. They are considered *arbitrary*. Theorems are proven from axioms.
I have asked you repeatedly to define your terminology. So I guess your purpose is be cryptic with semantics so as to claim some sort of victory"”rather than to communicate your ideas to our readers.
Something can be valid without being objective. You already stated that the belief that you are in pain is cognitively valid. Such a belief is based on a personal and decidedly subjective experience. There is no objective justification for such a belief. It could even be a phantom pain, spiritual anguish, or pangs of conscience.
That doesn't support your case. Even if you point to a naturalist who says that moral beliefs lack validity, that doesn't mean that all naturalists do. You had asserted that materialists were either committing a genetic fallacy or claiming that moral beliefs lack cognitive validity. That is not necessarily so. E.g., A naturalist can reasonably believe that moral beliefs have validity based in *intrinsic human nature*. In fact, science points to exactly those sorts of intrinsic moral predilections to help explain primate behavior, including humans.
You seem to want some sort of objective rigor from something that is not seen as objective by naturalists, or that conundrums must necessarily have simplistic solutions. People generally agree that traditions are an important aspect of humans existence worth preserving. People try to understand their morality within the prevailing cultural milieu.
(Alcohol is illegal in Saudi Arabia for men or women. That you may not agree with this stricture doesn't mean that they cannot point to a justification that you could comprehend as part of normal human moral sense. They place different valuations on the various aspects of the human condition. That doesn't make their morality unrecognizably human.)
Nor does that mean the naturalist cannot have his or her own opinion based on their own cultural and personal moral sense. And most naturalists (other than stringent philosophers) will draw a reasonable line.
What's with the consistent use of strawman arguments? Why insert the word "objective". I'm sure many naturalists would agree that burning babies for fun is immoral. Some naturalists may reject the *term* "moral". But in real life, many a naturalist would still feel moral repugnance (call it what you will) over such an occurrence and would be motivated to resist it.
There is no doubt that some people feel racism and xenophobia. How they deal with these emotions determines what we see as their morality.
Stunney, you seem to know a modicum of philosophy, but you don't seem to hear very well. You believe you know all the answers, so you never have to listen.
How many is too many? Is
onetoo many? How about my very first post; my very first declarative sentence on this thread."No."
Comment by Zachriel — May 26, 2007 @ 8:05 am
May 26th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
stunney is confused about science, among other things:
Science is not really "grounded in human experience". Yes, we start from human observation, but build from there into theoretical structures that are very much removed from bare experience. "Human experience" tells us that the earth is flat, the sun moves around the earth, that animal species are separate and unchanging, objects are solid, and many other things that turn out to be wrong once we investigate further. Science involves collecting many observations and incorporating them into a theoretical structure. Theories like evolution and quantum mechanics are very far removed from human experience, which is why people seem to have trouble assimilating them.
Morality is similar. We may feel very strongly that it's wrong to kill babies and also that everyone outside our tribe is an infidel who is not really human and deserves death or enslavement (even the babies — consistency is not a big factor in the untutored mind). That's pretty much the raw human experience. However, science and further exploration reveal that humans outside of our tribe are people too, and that their morality differs from ours in many points (and may be similar at others). More importantly, it reveals that our tribe is not the center of the universe, and the things we thought were the foundation of the cosmos, like our gods and moral codes, appear to be mere cultural inventions, contingent on history and appearing and disappearing in the blink of an eye, on the cosmic scale.
Some people can't take the apparent bleakness of this vision and try to cover their ears and go "nyah-nyah-nyah I cant hear you!". They try hard to reinvent systems that place themselves at the center of the universe. I'm mildly sympathetic, since hey, it does appear to me that I'm at the center of my universe. But I don't go around mistaking my personal universe for the universal one.
Comment by mtraven — May 26, 2007 @ 12:34 pm
May 26th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
Raevmo wrote:
Well, as they say in New York:
Buddy, if you don't know, I can't explain it to ya.
Because a world in which Berkeleyan idealism is true is much more readily conceivable than a world in which burning human children for fun is not immoral.
Or, using the customary philosophical idiom: there is a possible world in which Berkeleyan idealism is true; but there is no possible world in which burning human children for fun is not morally wrong.
Alternatively, 'Matter exists' is not a necessary truth. 'Burning human children for fun is immoral' is a necessary truth.
Zachriel wrote:
Yes, I know that.
And what's hilarious is that I just said that mathematicians use axioms in proving their theorems. You even quote me. To which you inanely replied by stating that theorems are proven from axioms.
It would be a bit like me saying that some Germans drink beer, and having you reply, no, beer is drunk by some Germans.:roll:
And I went on to say that if you think that fact about the need for axioms undermines the objectivity of mathematics, you should probably alert mathematicians, lest any bridges 'n' stuff fall down. It would be on your conscience otherwise.
As I've pointed out before:
You are implying that morality is a matter of human predilections. I think this is both false and explanatorily vacuous. Why? Because humanity also has a well known predilection for immoral behavior. Hence a) appealing to human predilection does nothing to distinguish moral from immoral behavior; and b) it explains nothing, because whatever humans do can be attributed to human predilections. You remember, the old falsifiable hypothesis that makes specific empirical predictions Thingie? 'Course you do!
Er, you missed out a bit. This bit:
"That last question was rhetorical…"
Do you know what a rhetorical question is? Apparently not, because when I posed it originally, you answered it right away.
You're not supposed to do that with rhetorical questions, and I was ironically observing the fact that it was taking you forever to cotton on to the fact. But as usual, I was a bit too subtle and was also as usual, amused that it was still whooshing right over that (allegedly) large-brain container of yours.
In other words, it was taking you too long to grasp the fact that I know, and expect other people to know, that science doesn't prescribe moral principles or values and that the latter do not reduce to scientific statements. Indeed, in the original post, I had just pointed out that the 20th century was the most scientifically advanced, the bloodiest, and the most polluted in human history. Therefore science per se is not going to make the world a better place. Instead of letting that obvious fact be the obvious fact that it is, you chose to 'teach' me that, no, science does not determine correct moral beliefs, etc.
You were 'teaching' me the very point I had just made using the rhetorical question "Did science tell you why?"
Are you a mid-Westerner by any chance?
There are three possibilities open to materialists, as I've already explained:
1) Materialists can commit the genetic fallacy. 2) Materialists can deny that there are any objective moral facts. Or 3) Materialists can be inconsistent.
If materialists believe that certain moral beliefs are objectively correct, then they believe that there are objectively correct moral propositions. But if there are such propositions, then materialism itself must be false, since the objective validity of those propositions isn't a material object, nor a material fact, nor a component of any complete and true physical description of the world. And that's because validity is an irreducibly normative property, not a property of matter.
Comment by stunney — May 26, 2007 @ 1:43 pm
May 26th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
mtraven wrote:
You're the confused one. Which is not surprising since materialists can't help being confused given how incoherent materialism is.
This is fun to watch.
I go on since the day I got here about the irreducibility of mathematical reason to matter or to any act of physical observation. I go on about the fact that the concept of empirical observation presupposes the concept of a rational mind to do the observing. And now you're telling me that because I go on about the fact that the experience of conscience is even more liable to generate a particular moral belief than observational experiences are liable to generate beliefs about evolutionary science, suddenly I'm too zealous an empiricist? Hahahaha. Er, hahaha.:lol:
You guys are a fucking scream.
As in, an orgasmic yell.
Have a nice holiday weekend.:cool:
Comment by stunney — May 26, 2007 @ 2:15 pm
May 26th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
Actually, it would properly be like you saying that some Germans use beer for drinking (with the reply as you outlined). See, I'm good for something around here.
I've been fairly silent about your namecalling for a while, but this is simply ridiculous. It's one thing when you resort to psychoanalyzing materialists for their own worldview (as though materialists aren't sincere in their efforts to find truth); it's another when you use prejudicial stereotyping (even in jest, which would be a tiny bit better) to insult people. Grow up.
Comment by thechristiancynic — May 26, 2007 @ 2:37 pm
May 26th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
There are some theists who are dualists, and many others who are monists.
I would not call myself a "theist" per se, but I am also a monist, of idealist stripe. I would say that "God" is just another word for the fundamental Oneness that is everything. The debate between atheists and non-atheists is whether that Oneness is fundamentally "dead matter" (that ends up looking more and more like something mental as you go into quantum mechanics) or more like mind and consciousness.
You don't like my terminology, but it does fit the dictionary definition of holism. If you have a specific item that you think I am confused about, let me know.
You are right, I am using holism in a way that is confusing you. Holism describes properties of a system that go beyond that of the component parts. In the case of quantum mechanics and the basic forces of nature, it is shown that the notion of "component parts" is itself false and illusionary, and that the whole system is all that is real. I also use holism to refer to additional organizing principles which you believe do not exist, and this is causing you confusion.
Both fit the dictionary definition for holism, but I should distinguish between the holism of the known physical fields and the holisms under dispute that organize protein folding, epigenesis, organism behavior and other higher-level holons, since people like you are in agreement with the holistic behaviors demonstrated by quantum mechanics and gravity, and in disagreement about holistic behaviors that organize higher-level systems. I am sorry for using terminology in a way that is confusing to you.
Probably a better approach for me to use would be to refer to the "agreed-upon holisms" of quantum mechanics and gravity and the "disputed holisms" that organize higher-level holon behavior.
In any event, the models of the agreed on holisms and disputed holisms all look similar in that they are non-local and field-like, and not much at all like the contact mechanics of molecular machines which are usually viewed similarly to human engineering machines. Of course, even human-engineered machines use electromagnetic fields and the like, but the typical "mental model" is much more of a contact mechanics, protein into receptor vision of how morphogenesis happens (since it is clear that electromagnetic fields in themselves will never account for the kinds of morphogenesis we see in nature).
Comment by mcromer — May 26, 2007 @ 2:46 pm
May 26th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
Yet, you say that you "take" certain moral precepts as axiomatic. Hence, they are not derived (theorems), but assumed (axiomatic). Even if we were to use the word "objective" to refer to the logical process of deriving theorems, this usage does not apply to axioms. In mathematics, axioms are *arbitrary*.
You are also still conflating different uses of the word "objectivity". You could simply clarify your terminology by offering clear definitions. But after repeated requests, you continue to refuse to do so.
objectivity, of, relating to, or being an object , phenomenon, or condition in the realm of sensible experience independent of individual thought and perceptible by all observers
You have simply ignored my argument and repeated yours. People do not exhibit random behavior. There are discernable patterns with regards to human concepts of morality that can be harnessed to help explain human cultural adaptation, including the complexities of morality and ethical systems.
I reread the exchange. I'm fairly certain no one thinks that you believe science prescribes moral principles. I clearly stated my own position from the beginning.
That you have presented a false dichotomy is also evident. You have claimed that a materialist is either committing a genetic fallacy by investigating the origins of morality, or they must deny that moral beliefs have any real cognitive validity.
You have stated that the belief that one is in pain is cognitively valid. Such a pain could be a phantom pain, spiritual anguish or pangs of conscience. Those pangs of conscience are an aspect of the moral sense. Hence, it is possible for a materialist to find that moral beliefs have cognitive validity. They can simultaneously study the evolutionary reasons why people experience pain; pain when they hurt themselves, pain when someone they love dies, and pain when they have betrayed a trust.
Comment by Zachriel — May 26, 2007 @ 2:46 pm
May 26th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
This is another example of where the differing meanings of "objective" leads to conflation. Most people read "objective" as the antonym of "subjective". Yet, you claim that you find objective truth in rational reflection, a subjective process. In science, objectivity refers to the consistency of empirical observations among different observers in similar situations.
It would behoove you to choose your words in such a way to avoid this conflation, perhaps even explaining how you are using certain words.
Comment by Zachriel — May 26, 2007 @ 2:52 pm
May 26th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
All systems of human belief start with human experience and go on from there to build conceptual edifices. The difference between science and other kinds of human thought is that with science we conduct experiments to test and falsify our conceptual edifices.
Someone who conducts and reads about these experiments and tests is doing science, and someone who refuses to is engaged in dogma-building.
Comment by mcromer — May 26, 2007 @ 3:04 pm
May 26th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
It may be impossible to fairly evaluate this claim due to confusion with the various terms, in particular, "objective". I'm sure most materialists would reject the concept of "objective moral facts", but would agree that humans have a well-developed moral sense as part of a repertoire of cultural adaptations.
(The statement I originally argued against used the phrase "cognitive validity" rather than "objective". Even then, it took a while to determine that stunney agreed that the belief that someone has a pain is "cognitively valid".)
Comment by Zachriel — May 26, 2007 @ 3:16 pm
May 26th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
I have been told in no uncertain terms by my sole mid-Westerner friend (possibly ex-friend after today) that my earlier reference was indeed offensive.
I apologize unreservedly to all who found it so.
As a Scot, I am used to, and am not at all offended by, the stereotype of Scots as being tightfisted. Let me assure you all that it's only those miserly bastards from Edinburgh and especially Aberdonians who deserve that epithet. We Glaswegians hold money in contempt and can't wait to get rid of it as soon as we have any—provided it's spent on 'drink'.
I don't have time this weekend for more debate but I knew I'd written a post recently that more clearly shows that, contrary to mtraven's flight of fancy, I am not the born-again empiricist fundamentalist he portrayed me as being. It's this one.
Comment by stunney — May 26, 2007 @ 6:48 pm
May 26th, 2007 at 7:07 pm
stunney:
I used to live and work in Edinburgh. Most of my colleagues at uni were English though (why do you suppose that is?), and not tightfisted at all. So you might be right. We did spend a lot on 'drink' and used to say 'eating is cheating'. I had a great time there except for the wind and rain.
Comment by Raevmo — May 26, 2007 @ 7:07 pm